My son has a friend who lives in Oakland. The guy shares a four bed, two bath house with three other guys. They pay $950 each for a room and a shared bath.
Yes. Sacramento is on the list. I own a home in Sacramento county that I rent out. My current tenant moved here from San Francisco because of high rent to live in a dump. She commutes the 100 miles to San Francisco for her job.
I don't know about the "going to" destinations, but the housing situation in the Bay Area is unbelievable: people with "good" jobs are illegally renting homeowners' garages, and living in those garages with other tenants...I have heard of people living in the cargo areas of non-functioning trucks and "renting" space in someone's backyard for the trucks to be "parked" in...I have heard of single bedrooms being "sub-divided" into "living spaces" for three people...and (from news reports) I know people were at least seriously thinking about creating "cocoon spaces" [a single bed-sized capsule, with maybe two feet of "head space"], like they have in Hong Kong, so six-to-twelve people could be crammed into a single large bedroom, each person having their own, "private," "sleeping space."
The last I heard, the overall housing situation had not improved.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/08/2018 08:47PM by Tevai.
Yes, it's bad here. Until a few years ago, rents were not too crazy compared to the cost of buying. However, rents have skyrocketed now as well, even in boring suburbs like mine. Much of that is due to people being unable to buy (as most in the suburbs want to do), so competition for rental places has gone up too. Even couples or singles with high incomes cannot easily save in many instances for a high-enough down payment, plus even if they do many people are outbid by buyers (not infrequently from China) offering the full amount in cash.
Especially within the last three years, I have known several people who've moved out of the Bay Area due to the cost of living--either to other states or to cheaper parts of CA (but mainly the former). One of my cousins just yesterday was telling me that three of clients (she's a hairstylist) have moved to Idaho in the past year. A close friend of mine also relocated with her family from the Bay Area to Boise about two years ago. I also have had friends relocate to Seattle for cheaper housing, though I hear that is getting bad too, as is Portland, OR, where my brother lives. He says in rents in Portland are really getting high.
Yes, California, and especially the Bay Area, has become a victim of its own success. Too many high paying jobs created and corresponding insufficient number of housing units being built. I am afraid it will take another jolt to the economy to perhaps calm things down.
I went and looked how much my apartment in SF rents for now. Right around 4K per month! And that doesn't even include parking. It's not even downtown but out by the beach in the Sunset.
Don't forget the homeless encampments, the feces and needles on streets, sidewalks, and parks, the crime increase, highest aggregate taxes in the country, traffic congestion, insufficient public transportation, declining public school standards, regulatory burdens, growing welfare class, fires, droughts, mudslides.
caffiend Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Don't forget the homeless encampments, the feces > and needles on streets, sidewalks, and parks, the > crime increase, highest aggregate taxes in the > country, traffic congestion, insufficient public > transportation, declining public school standards, > regulatory burdens, growing welfare class, fires, > droughts, mudslides.
And yet, despite all of this, there remains no shortage of people who want to live here.
Several posters have noted that people are fleeing the state. I understand most of them are middle class, which, if true, means a powerful income disparity, with a highly affluent at one end of the spectrum, and a growing underclass (highly immigrant) at the other end. According to LA/CBS-local, 44% of Californians do not speak English at home. That doesn't mean they're shut out of employment, of course, but it indicates a large number likely have little or minimal English skills, and therefore, reduced employment opportunities.
It is a mistake to confuse the Bay Area with San Francisco proper. Things can get much worse in the city even as life in the surrounding areas gets more comfortable and more opulent.
That said, the loss of the middle class--a phenomenon that to a lesser extent characterizes much of the US--is a major problem. Democracies only really work when they are rotted in big middle classes. If "middle" of the socioeconomic spectrum continues to shrink, the political and social outlook for the US will continue to darken.
The trend is acute in San Francisco, but seems to be spread throughout California in various, often horrendous, degrees. For example, the LA Times reports that (legal) Asian-American immigrants in Irvine successfully fought off a relocation of illegal immigrants from the Anaheim area, where they were camped along the Santa Ana River. 404 tons of garbage were picked up, along with 13,950 needles and 5,279 pounds of human waste which was seeping into the river.*
Wow, that's even worse than an "Occupy Wall Street" encampment!
A growing problem in LA County is RVs on the streets. They don't run, and when the waste system is filled up, they're abandoned. Junk and tow yards won't take them because of the sanitation problems, and the CNG tanks which must be certified as empty.
So maybe "the surrounding areas (in Silicon Valley that are) more comfortable and more opulent" don't have these problems. Wealth hath its privileges.
*Makes you wonder how this was calibrated, and by whom!
Actually, you ha e it backwards in San Francisco. Neighborhoods in San Francisco that most people wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole 30 years ago, such as Noe Valley and Bernal Heights, and former working class neighborhoods such as Glen Park, have been gentrified to the point where there are virtually no properties worth less than seven figures. It is San Francisco that overall has grown more opulent than ever before.
I have friends who purchased a fixed-upper in Diamond Heights for $250,000 in the early 90s. They sold it for 1.4 million in 2011 and bought a house near Los Gatos for 2.2 million. In 2014, they'd finally had it with life in the Bay Area and moved to Tucson, Arizona where they have a large home and acreage.
Yep. In the San Francisco of the 70s and 80s, these neighborhoods to the south of the Financial District down to the City's southern border were considered much more marginal, and certainly not the kinds of neighborhoods that wealthy folks of the time sought to live in. Because of gentrification, home prices in these neighborhoods have outperformed the increases elsewhere in SF and the Bay Area.
...according to NBC-local. As a point of comparison, the "Big Dig" in Boston, where a decaying elevated highway was torn down and replaced with a tunnel system, was projected to cost $4B, but ended up about $22B. It is, so far, the most expensive public works project ever in America.
Ron Blum, a principal in the Tutor Perini firm, and husband of a US Senator, won the first $1B in construction conracting, despite a "low technical score" (LA Times). BTW, the bullet train will share rail space with slower, conventional trains around LA and SF, reducing the over-all high-speed benefits, like the Northeast Acela (DC-Boston) rarely achieves its top speed of 120 MPH.
Hey, it's only taxpayer money. Plenty more where that comes from.
I guess we've gone political enough to get this thread axed, huh?
Plenty of articles, from centrist to conservative, discussing how the bullet train will never pay for itself, and the costs keep going up, up, up. Nothing from the political left, which seems incapable of ever criticizing a mass transit project. At about $100B already, and sure to go much higher, is this something California, with $1.5T in state and local debt, California should be doing?
As long as it doesn't involve Federal (i.e., my) tax dollars.
So okay, Dave, I'll bite: Yes, I declare this a boondoggle.
Yes it really is that bad here. I've lived in my home for a few decades and I could never afford to buy my own home at today's prices. I don't know how the young people do it. It makes me sad to see so many people struggling to survive here.
Just to rent a room in a house costs anywhere from $1,000-2,000 a month. Someone told me the other day that she considered leaving her apartment to live in campsites with her young child.
Young people with student loan debt and high rents to pay...how will they ever afford to buy a home here? They just won't.