
Inventory of Homes for Sale Is Rising in Silicon Valley and San Francisco - Fjolsvith
https://wolfstreet.com/2019/01/07/housing-bubble-trouble-silicon-valley-san-francisco/
======
TomVDB
In the past 3 years, all houses in my small neighborhood (6 out of ~40 houses)
were bought by employees of Google, Facebook, and Apple.

Last week, one nicer 4BR house sold for 20% less than a smaller 3BR house that
sold in April for a ridiculous $2.4M (that then underwent major remodeling for
6 months.)

Now look at the stock price of those companies between then and now, and the
increased interest rate.

AFAICS this has not to do with foreign investments unwinding or people moving
out of CA, but houses having become too expensive compared to what people
could afford earlier with a mix of increased fear and uncertainty thrown in.

~~~
kshacker
Absolutely this. Imagine what a Facebook millionaire could buy when the stock
was above 200 and now 140. 30% less down payment, no? Imagine what an Apple
employee could put down at 235 vs at 140? Imagine what a Netflix employee
could put down by cashing out at 400? Of course rates matter but from what I
hear they will not go up much more from here. Eventually these companies will
recover and most of them will go higher (they are becoming de facto
monopolies) and the watch the prices although it may be a couple of years, but
you never know, the stock printing machine is still running.

~~~
thatfrenchguy
You're assuming people don't sell their RSU when they get them, which is
reckless behaviour.

~~~
notyourwork
> which is reckless behaviour.

It depends on the amount of risk and diversification you are looking for as
well as where you are in your financial career. For example, if you have no
college debt, and can afford to live off of your salary alone, leaving RSUs as
company stock when they vest is no different than a non-employee buying shares
of that stock at the vest price.

Diversification is great but not everyone is in the same financial situation
to assume there is a one size fits all rule.

~~~
andrewvc
Which is reckless....

The only situation where that makes sense is if you're not only good at
whatever job you have, but you're an expert stock picker and you discover
through your superior skill that the one stock with the greatest upside
is..... your employer!

The argument against your POV is right in your answer: _leaving RSUs as
company stock when they vest is no different than a non-employee buying shares
of that stock at the vest price._

If instead of getting $X in RSUs you got $X in 'bonus' cash every month would
you turn around and put it right into your employer's stock? Probably not.

Regardless of how confident you are in your employer, most people's single
biggest investment is their job. Correlating your investments _and_ your
regular income is making an incredibly narrow bet which is reckless unless you
can see the future.

~~~
TomVDB
About seeing the future: one advantage that employees have over investors is
the ability to see the future in terms which products are in the pipeline.

One other reason to hold on to stock instead of selling are taxes: in the case
of ESPP, holding on for a year (or sometimes more), it can make a huge
difference in the case of heavily appreciated stock.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
But they can’t see what is in the future pipelines of competitors or other
sectors. That’s where diversification comes in. Picking one stock does not
work and has never worked. Just because someone is a dev doesn’t mean they can
see the future.

~~~
TomVDB
It doesn’t matter whether or not an employee can look into the future of a
different company: he still has the advantage over others by knowing the
roadmap of his own company.

------
kindatrue
If you ever want to understand why parts of Silicon Valley has a 16:1 new
jobs:new homes ratio, check out this twitter:
[https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/999364778907914245](https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/999364778907914245)

The NIMBYism is insane. You have people who own $2M houses ($1.9M of which is
capital gains) complaining about gentrification and ruined neighborhood
character.

~~~
ghobs91
Yup. I've always found it so bizarre that NIMBYs feel entitled to a
neighborhood that remains exactly as it was when they bought their home. Is it
reasonable to expect a 10 year old car to operate the same as the day you
bought it?

It's especially absurd since we're talking about a global, dynamic city, not
some small rural town. Can you imagine if 1900s NYC had the NIMBY culture of
present day SF? It would've severely choked its growth.

SF's saving grace is its VC ecosystem and network effect between existing
talent. You can barely even say they have a monopoly on talent pool, since the
ivy leagues and many other top schools are nowhere near SF. These factors are
gradually growing in other cities, and the bay area will get to a point where
the cost of living will turn it into just another city. They've essentially
created one of the worlds largest funnels of money into landlords pockets. So
much wasted capital.

This isn't like the finance stronghold in NY or entertainment in LA, tech
companies are involved in every industry, and don't need to be in SF to
thrive.

~~~
Kalium
California's property tax system, and often hyper-local control over planning,
encourages the idea that once you buy an area is frozen in time.

------
matheweis
A nearly identical story is playing itself out in Seattle (1). I saw a house
drop in price by $150k recently - a year ago you would have had to offer $150k
over asking price just to play in the market at all.

It’s slowing in other major markets Dallas (2), Denver (3), and others,
although not as severely.

From my perspective as a recent home seller and a prospective home buyer, the
turnaround is largely due to the increasing interest rates.

As a seller you suddenly don’t want to risk holding out for the best possible
offer because you know the average person might not be able to afford as much
soon, and even if that’s questionably accurate, the uncertainty makes you more
willing to consider offers.

As a buyer, even a 50 basis points change (half a percent) has a significant
effect on what you can afford especially if you’re going to be highly
leveraged. You’d be surprised the number of people doing crazy things like
10/10/80 Jumbo loans to get in the market, even in tech.

From both the buyer and seller side there was an insane amount of demand just
as rates started going up as people were pushing the limits to get in at the
best rates. I suspect this pushed prices up sharply in early 2018, making the
following slowdown as rates went up appear more severe than it otherwise would
have.

In the Seattle area, taxes are also a minor factor; there’s recently been
several significant hikes in property taxes that eat further into
affordability - I’m not sure if that’s the case in other markets, but it
wouldn’t surprise me.

1\. [https://seattlebubble.com/blog/2019/01/07/nwmls-home-
price-g...](https://seattlebubble.com/blog/2019/01/07/nwmls-home-price-gains-
vanish-as-sales-continue-to-slip/)

2\. [https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-u-s-housing-boom-is-
coming-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-u-s-housing-boom-is-coming-to-an-
end-starting-in-dallas-1543248073)

3\. [https://www.denverpost.com/2018/12/26/home-price-
increases-s...](https://www.denverpost.com/2018/12/26/home-price-increases-
slow-case-shiller/)

~~~
cobookman
I considered 80-10-10 over traditional 20% down as a way to lower my risk and
leverage cheap interest rates.

Put the other 10% down in a diversified stock portfolio over 10 years would
likely fetch > 4.5% apr.

~~~
sjg007
A lower down is good when the market is appreciating fast and you can either
refinance or get PMI removed.

~~~
cobookman
Many lenders in Bay area don't charge PMI with an 80-10-10. And you can also
have the mortgage be a 30 year fixed loan.

~~~
sjg007
Ah thanks. That is very creative!

------
lordnacho
The elephant in the room is interest rates. After years of zero rates / QE
that's now coming to an end.

Markets have seen it too after many years of going up, and many of the tech
workers in the Bay Area are paid in the growth-sensitive (rate-sensitive)
shares of their employers. Those shares have come down a fair bit recently,
and your marginal buyer might well be a big tech employee.

~~~
dilyevsky
Mortgage rates have been in steady decline for a few months now.

~~~
maccio92
a steady decline from a massive high..

we started 2018 with a 3.95% for 30 year mortgage, it went all the way up to
4.94% in november. sure, it's declined since then, but only to 4.51% current
rate which is still much higher than what we started 2018 at

~~~
rsj_hn
Wow, how far back does your memory go if you think 4.94% is a "massive high"?
Since the modern (post-Bretton Woods) era, mortgages have been above 5% every
year until the 2009 crisis, and usually above 7%.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US)

Going back even further, Measuring Worth
[https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/interestrates/](https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/interestrates/)

has long term interest rate data from 1790 and rates now are lower than in 88%
of other years -- the only other major periods of such low rates was the
depression era to WW2 price/rate controls: 1936-1955. Roughly prior to when
the Federal reserve gained its independence and was able to set policies apart
from federal budget needs.

You are living in a very special period of historically low rates.

------
gdubs
Bay Area realtors have been aggressively marketing to wealthy Chinese buyers
for a while now. The Chinese government has started putting limits on American
real estate investment. Given the scale of the high-end market, I’d think
that’d be enough to have a measurable effect.

Edit: “Bay Area” not “Baby Area” :)

~~~
Tade0
> Baby Area

Not sure if this was intentional but makes for a great reference to SV's
apparent ageism.

~~~
api
It's autocorrect. Mobile is the foot rub. (That's an autocorrect of "mobile is
the future" that I saw once.)

------
cleansy
The end of this article reads like this is a bad thing.

> These hopes still exist, and at least some of those IPOs will happen this
> year. While the water is a little ruffled, these are still the boom times in
> the Bay Area.

It's more like the market comes back to a stable position, stopping the
craziness of the last couple of years. It's actually a good thing. I'm in
Europe and did not buy an apartment in the last 3 years even though I could
have and wanted to. Just waiting for the overpriced square meter prices to
fall to a more sustainable level - and if SV takes the first shot, so it might
do in the rest of the world.

~~~
bradleyjg
This is why such a high rate of homeownership is pernicious. When the costs of
TVs, food, or gasoline goes down it’s widely recognized as a good thing. When
the costs of housing—a universal necessity—-goes down it’s a national
emergency about which something must be done.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Wall street did plenty of bitching and moaning over the oil price declines
that happened in the past 5yr and there was not shortage of articles decrying
that even though it might look like a good thing from the perspective of
someone who has to buy gasoline that it was actually a bad thing for the
economy.

~~~
bradleyjg
There’s always going to be someone unhappy for any good or service. But with
homes it’s a majority of the electorate. That’s highly problematic.

------
guiomie
Lots of people can only afford a house in the bay area because of their RSUs.
With the stock market slowing down, it seems normal to see housing cooling
down. Now, add the new tax laws which impact a lot of residents of California
(capped mortgage interest deduction) and interest rates going up, it only
makes sense that the next phase is prices going down. And I'm certainly
biased, I just bought a house in Sunnyvale 6 months ago, which seems to be
around peak market.

------
jartelt
I wonder how much of this is due to number of capable buyers dwindling when
prices reach a certain point. There is a good number of people willing to buy
a junky 2 bedroom house on the peninsula for $1M. Make that house $1.5M and
raise rates a little bit and maybe people just start to say no thank you.

If you want to buy that $1.5M project, you need like $200K for the down
payment and fees. Plus, you need the capital to remodel.

Perhaps salaries simply haven't kept up with the rise in home prices?

~~~
nostrademons
You also see people moving away because the switching costs become worth it at
those prices.

"Would you leave all your friends, family, coworkers, and local knowledge
behind for $50K?" is a hard sell. For $500K some people would consider it, but
lots more wouldn't. For $1M and suddenly people might be like "Y'know,
starting over in a new location is a pain in the ass, but a million bucks is a
lot of money." Plus a lot of the big tech companies will let you relocate to
satellite offices and keep your job if you've had several years tenure with
them.

------
docker_up
I'm not holding my breath yet.

A house in my neighborhood with extensive, extensive termite damage went
pending after its first weekend, for over $2.0 million with multiple offers.
My friend and I were discussing strategies for how much to bid, thinking it
might go for $1.4 million, and then he could commit cash for a reno, but nope.

There are still a lot of people with a lot of money that want houses in good,
safe neighborhoods in good school districts.

~~~
WhompingWindows
Where do the teachers live in these ridiculously priced districts?

~~~
danso
They probably commute, just like the firefighters:
[http://fortune.com/2016/03/28/silicon-valley-housing-
crisis-...](http://fortune.com/2016/03/28/silicon-valley-housing-crisis-
firefighters/)

------
option
I live about 15-20 mins away from Apple and Netflix. The house next to ours
has been empty for more than 2 years (as long as we lived in the
neighborhood). Once a year, a Chinese lady (other neighbors say she lives in
China now) appears in it for a day or two. The house is not for sale or rent
and its estimate is over 1.5M.

~~~
briandear
The other part of that story is that due to Prop 13, you have old ladies
living in 5 bedroom houses by themselves because if they downsize, their tax
basis gets recalculated. So they might pay $5k per year on that big, expensive
house but they might end up with $10k per year if they move to a much cheaper
house directly next door.

~~~
refurb
_California homeowners 55 and older can get a one-time opportunity to sell
their primary residence and transfer the property tax assessment to a new home
under Proposition 60. The caveat here is the market value of the new house
generally must be lower or equal to the home being sold. For married couples,
only one spouse must be 55 or older._

~~~
masonic
ONLY when moving within the same county, or to one of the 9 (?) that accepts
such transfers.

Prop 5 would have applied statewide and would have freed up thousands of such
homes in the Bay Area.

------
vasilipupkin
this guy is always writing "everything is a bubble" articles. Ignore him. It's
clear that SF real estate is affected by tech stock fortunes, but it's also
clear that on average it appreciates roughly on par with stock market. So, if
you work and live in bay area, buy a house because you want to live in it, not
because you are speculating on real estate. Incidentally, unlike in many other
parts of the country, over a long period of time, it is likely to prove a
decent investment.

~~~
moorhosj
I'm not sure "nothing is a bubble" is the proper reaction to "everything is a
bubble". Do you have any rebuttals for the specific data mentioned in the
article (surge in housing inventory, price cuts and falling asking prices)?

~~~
vasilipupkin
why does specific data need a rebuttal?

~~~
moorhosj
You are contending there is not a bubble, while the data presented indicates
that there is a bubble. I was wondering if you had any data or analysis to
back up your "no bubble" assertion or rebut the "bubble" assertion?

~~~
vasilipupkin
sorry, where did I make an assertion that there is no bubble? you must be
confusing me with some other article?

~~~
moorhosj
You said to ignore the person who presented the argument that there is a
bubble.

~~~
Kalium
You're right! The poster did say that.

Some might mark a distinction between "there is no bubble" and "this author's
predictions of when there is a bubble are not reliable or trustworthy". The
former is a pretty strong claim, requiring precisely the sort of clear and
specific evidence you have wisely and correctly called for.

The latter point suggests that the author should not be taken as authoritative
and the evidence they present for their argument is not to be taken seriously.
As a side effect, this means that the question at hand - bubble or not -
remains unaddressed.

------
evgeniysharapov
Someone probably expressed this idea, but why why why tech companies stay in
SF area ? Their operations do not depend on being local to SF. It looks like
the tech sector is the single driver of the SF economy. Everyone is quick to
blame regulations or residents who support these regulations, but why not to
press tech giants to move, even gradually, their operations elsewhere, or
distribute it across the whole state/country/world, starting from depressed
areas with no jobs.

~~~
ravenstine
Putting aside any theories around the "Cult of Silicon Valley", the typical
answer I get when I ask others that same question is that "tech" companies
group in these areas, especially SF, because it makes it easier to get the
best talent; since _everyone_ already lives in the same area, there's
hypothetically no moving expenses that would stop candidates from accepting a
job, especially when it comes to candidates with families.

Personally, I don't completely buy that explanation, and think there's an
unspoken cult-like quality to the tech scene of SF/SV that confines it to a
few cramped spaces in the country. Big "tech" still represents the modern form
of the American Dream and the Gold Rush to countless people, and San Francisco
is symbolic of that idealism in and of itself. Making six figures and living
in the outskirts working for a company nobody's heard of _isn 't as cool_ as
working for Unicorn X in Mountain View, CA.

~~~
TheBeardKing
I would take a 20% pay cut to be able to live somewhere like the Bay Area with
its coastal scenery and perfect weather. But as it is, I'd need to triple my
salary to be able to afford to live there.

~~~
gamblor956
A lot of tech companies are opening/expanding offices in LA.

------
nabla9
Known unknown in those areas is the effect of securities-backed loans aka
shadow margin. They are not tracked by SEC or margin debt statistics.

Once you have non-retirement financial assets over $100,000, you may get a low
interest revolving loan (SBLOC) from the broker that is 50-90% of your
portfolio without other restrictions.

Mortgage against the house + SBLOC might combine into very high level of risk.
It has been amazing leverage during the decade long stock market boom, but if
there is downturn, it can create massive havoc. These loans are subject to a
maintenance call asking more collateral with little or no advanced warning.

------
joeblau
I was just thinking about this last week. My wife has been looking at houses
in the bay. Four years ago when we still lived there and we were looking, it
seemed like there were very few options available. We ended up leaving the
area and moving to Pittsburgh (which has been great), but we're looking at
places back in the bay and there seem to be so many more options today.

~~~
conanbatt
Anecdotally, I see some price stagnation in SF, but I dont think it got any
better long term.

~~~
refurb
Inventory is way, which I think is what the OP is referring to.

~~~
joeblau
Yeah, Inventory is up which will hopefully lead to price drops. I've seen a
few over the previous months but nothing that's extreme which does make it
appear as simply stagnation.

------
christkv
Could it be foreign money divesting in California housing ?

~~~
matheweis
This is a hot issue up in the Seattle/Vancouver area as well. tl/dr, the
proper studies I’ve seen suggest foreign money doesn’t have as strong an
effect as most people assume, and where it does it amplifies trends rather
than drives them.

~~~
petermcneeley
Does there actually exist a dataset that shows this? The data that you need is
income, age, wealth (loans), purchase price etc. I dont even think the
government has this data, and even if it did Im guessing for privacy reasons
this dataset would never be made public.

~~~
danso
California county assessor records are, or were public. When I worked in
Sacramento a decade ago, you could look up property by address on the county
website and not only get the assessed value and taxes owed, but the name of
the owner and realtor, past owners, price paid and amount of loan. Seems like
much of that info has been removed from the public facing website, but that
doesn’t mean it isn’t available for purchase. That’s presumably how Zillow
gets its data.

~~~
muzz
The records have names, but how do you correlate that with nationality? I.e.,
there are plenty of people with Chinese or Indian names that are Americans.

~~~
danso
It would be a statistical estimate. Some foreign buyers may have trusted go-to
realtors who specialize in these kinds of transactions. IIRC, home owners have
to indicate whether a home is a primary residence or being used for rental
(for tax purposes). All these factors may make the statistical estimate more
accurate with reality.

~~~
petermcneeley
Is this not a valid estimate?

"The study found that two-thirds of all sales of detached houses in the
University Endowment Lands, Dunbar and Point Grey neighbourhoods were
purchased by buyers with non-anglicized Chinese names. That group purchased 88
per cent of houses priced at more than $5-million."

[https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-
columbia/vancou...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-
columbia/vancouvers-housing-market-fuelled-by-chinese-buyers-
study/article27064577/)

~~~
danso
Sure, though that study was done in Vancouver, and their laws about real
estate records being public record might be different than California or the
other U.S. states (the article mentions only the methodology regarding Chinese
names). You asked if there was a dataset that could be used in studying impact
of foreign buyers; I was just pointing out that the government most definitely
collects data of real estate transactions and generally makes it publicly
available in the U.S.

------
anilshanbhag
It can't keep going up forever. There is enormous demand around $800k which is
still significantly higher than the median price of homes of around $500k
Houston/Dallas. As supply increases, prices will fall and hopefully people can
buy houses finally.

~~~
arbuge
The median home price in Dallas is way below $500k:

[https://www.zillow.com/dallas-tx/home-values/](https://www.zillow.com/dallas-
tx/home-values/)

Even if you restrict yourself to the nicer northern suburbs, that's still way
off:

[https://www.zillow.com/plano-tx/home-values/](https://www.zillow.com/plano-
tx/home-values/)

------
OliverJones
The magnet cites (NY, Boston, Vancouver BC, Sili Valley, San Francisco) all
have nosebleed housing prices.

Are they sustainable? Or, just maybe, do some of the present owners want to
cash out?

As long as people move to magnet cities and are willing to put half their pay
into housing, the prices will hold up.

But, somewhere along the way the HR departments at big tech will start
hearing, "I'd love to accept your offer but I can't afford to live anywhere
near your office." That's when the "fundamentals" (stockbroker lingo)
underneath housing prices will start to erode.

------
phantom0308
The inventory chart at the top of the article is a bit misleading. It'd be
better to use a months supply of inventory chart. A 100% increase in inventory
is equivalent to a -50% decrease in inventory, but they show up out of
proportion. It's much easier to increase inventory by 100% if the months of
supply is very very low. (e.g. going from 1 month of inventory to 2 months of
inventory is a lot less substantial than 2 months to 4 months)

------
foobiekr
Timing is everything - we are planning on putting our home in Mountain View on
the market next month ... or at least we are for now.

Now it seems like we might be better off holding in to it and renting it out.

~~~
halbritt
The market is unlikely to shift that much in a month and prices are still near
an all-time high. It might be more difficult to get it to sell, but that
doesn't make it a bad time. If the real-estate market does take a real
downturn and the economy follows, it may take 5-10 years to regain its current
value.

~~~
foobiekr
Yes, that’s my hope.

The funny thing is, we aren’t obsessed with maximizing value so it should be
interesting. If there was a model for limit orders in real estate we’d just
set a limit or a buy-it-now price just to get the process over with. The whole
real estate industry is a messy dance.

The last cycle of the valley startups intended to disrupt this stuff - Zillow,
zipreality, Redfin - seems to have quickly been co-opted into the traditional
model.

~~~
halbritt
I agree with your observations. The startups have given us new tools and maybe
lowered reduced the cost of commissions, but it's still real estate people
doing real estate things.

If you're not worried about maximizing value overmuch, I wager that demand
will be sufficiently high in a month that you can complete a quick sale if
your house is priced at the market rate.

Sellers in the bay area are accustomed to pricing houses 20% above market and
still seeing a bidding war that includes cash offers. I'm guessing that the
houses sitting on the market have sellers that are unwilling to let go of them
without getting a big profit.

------
sjg007
"But a slew of massive IPOs are being hyped for 2019 – Uber, Palantir, Lyft,
Airbnb, and the like – before the Nasdaq craters, thereby shutting the IPO
window. "

Why do we expect Nasdaq to crater?

~~~
OldHand2018
> Why do we expect Nasdaq to crater?

Oh, you can blame that on all of us olds that have lived through 3-6 business
cycles, yet still have functioning memories and attention spans. The last
time, we were presented with data proving that it would never crash. We heard
stories about why things were different this time. The time before that, we
got data and stories. The time before that, we got data and stories.

Lest you panic and feel sad, we can also tell you that without fail, things
will be going well again a few years later, we will have incredible gains in
the markets and workforce, and soon after that we will start hearing of record
highs in the markets and records lows in the unemployment rate. Such is life
in an advanced society.

~~~
marcosdumay
I still can't think of any time it was announced that global markets would
crash and they did actually crash. (I'm at the small limit of that range, with
memories of 3 cycles.)

Everything I see points to a crash, but I am not sure a crash is even possible
when people expect it.

------
zellyn
Just a reminder about apenwarr's fantastic blog post about Bay Area housing
price simulation:
[https://apenwarr.ca/log/20180918](https://apenwarr.ca/log/20180918)

The tl;dr is that as soon as demand exceeds supply, prices shoot up to the
average software engineers can afford.

~~~
nostrademons
The same applies to many inelastic markets with bimodal (or otherwise "lumpy")
distributions. When the supply falls below demand from the highest tiers only,
there's a sudden sharp spike in price, as all the lower tiers are priced out
of the market entirely. The market-clearing price becomes what the higher-
paying buyers are willing & able to pay, because there's not enough product to
service the lower-paying mass market anyway and so no incentive to price
affordably for them.

You see this most dramatically with startups. A single engineer might go for
$200K/year. If that single engineer founds a startup that develops a
commanding lead in a market that suddenly becomes interesting to a big
company, they can fetch billions. Why? Because now instead of there being one
Yahoo and 30,000 Jan Koums, there is one WhatsApp and some very deep-pocketed
Googles/Facebooks/Yahoos.

It applies to other markets like gasoline, therapists, health care, etc. too.
When demand exceeds supply, all the "excess" demand simply has to go without,
and the market-clearing price rises to the maximum that the marginal customer
can pay.

------
megaman8
You have to remember, the % increase in housing inventory was already
extroadinarily low. So if that tiny number doubles, it's not as big of a
change as you might imagine.

------
johnwyles
Honest question about the graph because I haven't had my coffee yet: doesn't
this red spike simply mean the 2018 levels returned to the 2016 levels?

------
masonic
I am shocked, _shocked!_ that people tend to take their houses off the market
for the holidays and reactivate listings after the holidays.

------
Fjolsvith
Could this be caused by people emigrating from California?

~~~
diplocorp
It would be interesting to compare the Seattle and Boston prices to see if
this is the case.

~~~
matheweis
Seattle has had a nearly identical slowdown, so perhaps not entirely due to
California emigration... although the water is muddy - reportedly people are
exiting Seattle for greener pastures as well.

~~~
devmunchies
I have a theory that a major portion of the population in Seattle is always
churning. Lots of people moving in and out (Like a college town). But if they
can’t get people to keep moving in, you end up getting huge deflation.

The weather is a shock to lots of people.

I just sold my house in Seattle and will be leaving next month.

~~~
vkou
Seattle may be a revolving door, but the main reason people are leaving is
because they can't afford it, so they move out to the boonies, and commute.

Despite that, it is having an unprecedented net population boom.

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conanbatt
A narrative without numbers.

