Even with the fires, the Bay Area has had one of the nicest climates for living in the last half decade out of any place in the United States. In the inner Bay Area, PG&E went out for maybe a day during last year’s red flag. Water for consumption is never scarce, most use is agricultural which will be cut far before people are impacted. Certainly there are infrastructure construction concerns (also almost universal in the US), but it’s been one of the safest regions in the coronavirus crisis so even ability to do things seems underestimated.
The problem is the quality of life expectations are quite high when you pay $3000 for 1 bedroom.
While air quality/electricity concerns may only last a few weeks per year, and maybe covid is just 6 months (but 1 year is more likely) you then have a city overrun with homeless, walk outside your apartment to see someone sleeping on your stoop, accidentally step on human feces regularly, the BART escalators and most of Market Street stinks of urine, cars are broken into, people are regularly walking into stores, grabbing stuff, and running away with the cashiers screaming at them.
Then you look at your friends in the rest of the country that have already bought a house, and the consolation that you may only be able to rent but it's in a great city -- it starts to wear a bit thin.
The problem is the quality of life expectations are quite high when you pay $3000 for 1 bedroom.
Relative to what you make, is that a lot, compared to what you'd make/pay in Kansas City?
Do you realize that the AQI is terrible for literally a third of the US right now?
If climate change is going to ruin CA, then it will also ruin a LOT of other places. Relatively speaking, the Bay Area will be nicer still, albeit much more expensive, than other places.
Idk about your job but my job would is willing to pay me a bonus to leave SF and will only cut my salary by 10%. Definitely seems worth it to me. Especially factoring in not needing to pay cali income or sales tax.
The bay areas has never been nice in the last 5 years. I can live in a more comfortable house where I don’t have to work 3ft from where I sleep in almost any other city.
$5k bonus and I have to stay at the company for a year. If I moved to Seattle (0% income tax), I would not have a pay cut and I would no longer need to pay California's 9.4%. Easy raise and bonus :).
Similar story for Orlando, but with a 10% cut. 10% pay cut and saving 9.3% in income and ~1.3% sales tax. Housing would be about $500/mo cheaper ($6k/yr) and way more comfortable to work from.
Taking this comment on good faith, I'm just asking for my own edification. I've lived in Seattle, downtown adjacent, for 10+ years, and really love it, even with COVID, outside of the few weeks where we've had bad smoke. Obviously if half the year is going to be like this, I'm leaving regardless of the salary ramifications, but if we are talking a week or so every couple years, it might be a different story. I moved to Seattle to escape other problematic issues where I used to live, and I suspect the same is true for lots of folks.
I can’t imagine why you moved to Seattle to escape “problematic issues” with where you lived before. Were you in Phoenix before...? Seattle isn’t exactly a place that lacks problems. I left in 2014 and as far as I can tell, it has only gotten worse with its issues.
Shhh! Not in front of the Coastals. Remember your debriefing when you left. The InterMountain West is whatever they think they don’t want. If you must, say you were in Montana or Idaho. Maybe Canada. Mention Breaking Bad, buses powered by burros, radioactive waste bins beside recycling bins...
Of course SLC has worse average AQI than a coastal city like SF. If you are inland and have a large population, you will have worse particulates. So let's look at coastal cities all of which have air quality as good or better than SF and have the bonus of warm water so you can swim at the beach:
Jacksonville, FL:
median HH income: 47K
median house price: 196K
Price to Income: 4.2
Charleston, SC:
median household income: 64K
median house price: 337K
median price to income: 5.3
Wilmington, NC:
median household income: 53K
median house price: 300K
price to income: 5.7
Do you see a pattern?
And none of these cities have streets filled with feces and homeless encampments, a 16% state income tax with high income surcharge, or refuse to prosecute property crime.
Where are you getting 16% state income tax from? In your median income example of 108k, the top rate for single filer is 9.3%, but that payers effective rate is only 6.6% (summed over all bracket). This is not much higher than Utah's flat 4.95%
Even a single filer making $500k/year will only hit a top rate of 11.3%, and effective rate of 9.4%. For surcharges to kick in requires > $1M/year, and only affects the amount over that.
Probably including the sales tax or something in the figure. Isn’t California one of the worst states in the country for tax burden?
I do find it weird that CA has some of the worst taxes for new residents. I can’t imagine a place that is more difficult to break into and then settle in. (High property values, outrageously high property taxes, high sales tax, high income tax, etc...) It’s setup to only let the rich get in and stay. Not a very inclusive place.
It still wouldn't make any sense including sales tax. The effect of sales tax on total tax burden scales even less linearly than the steeply progressive CA income tax rates! The more you earn, the smaller % of your income goes to things that are sales taxed.
The income tax scale in CA is steeply progressive, a 50k earner pays only 3.8%, less than almost all states that have flat income tax. For a median earner, CA is in the upper half but not exceptionally high:
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-bur...
Having been in very high income brackets myself, lived in both low and high col areas/states, and run this calculation often, I think taxes is largely a red herring. The difference made by tax is just peanuts compared to the impact of housing cost, which truly is very high in CA. For low income brackets, CA is frequently lower tax burden than elsewhere, but housing cost will destroy you. For very high income brackets you do start to see the difference in marginal tax rate, but your absolute income is so much higher that you aren't spending a significant % on sales tax, and those marginal differences aren't driving your decision making anymore.
> Then you look at your friends in the rest of the country
But you don't need to go to the rest of the country, just step outside San Francisco city limits. Everything described in the second paragraph is pretty unique to San Francisco. Not something you really see in Silicon Valley proper.
A one bedroom apartment is perhaps the most unfavorable comparison (the housing stock is predominantly SFHs, so bedrooms in a shared home are a lot more plentiful than one bedrooms, which are usually in apartments), yet I see multiple listings for $2,200/mo in Redwood City, a fairly central part of the Bay. You don’t have to live in San Francisco, FYI, and even still your particularly dystopian portrait seems off the mark from my lived experience. And your COVID point makes no sense: the Bay Area has come out relatively better off in the pandemic than most other places.
A similar apartment in Austin would be around $1,300/mo. Is $10,000/yr really the difference between middling and “quite high” expectations for quality of life? How do you price access to a far more competitive market for your labor? Is it the state taxes, then, which push you over the edge?
You’re not getting a nice place for $2200/month in RWC compared to what that $1300/month would get you in Austin or whereever. For that amount, you’re next to the tracks and living in the ghetto in an uninsulated shitbox.
I'm nitpicking but it is demonstrably false that residents will feel no impact from water shortages. People who have lived through the last few droughts know this. They may cut agriculture, by far the majority water consumer in the state, but it will still mean restrictions on yard irrigation, car washing, bill increases, and constant nagging. Now, anyone who plants a lawn in CA needs to reexamine their priorities, but still, it is just one more quality of live impact from living in this state.
By far, the worst thing about the Bay Area is the stress level. This is not a comfortable place for the majority of the residents and it shows. Happiness is largely driven by one's expectations, and the marketing and image of CA drives those quite high. There is, I think, quite a bit of unhappiness arising from the CA image vs CA reality. On top of that, you are competing with other people trying to live that dream and working quite hard to do so.
I think CA still has many strong points, but if I wasn't paying a fixed alimony payment I would have sacrificed the higher income for more happiness and left years ago. I spent half my life here and enjoyed what I think were the last of the good times in CA.
In the East Bay, EBMUD has not ever imposed restrictions of any kind even in the severe droughts of the 70s. The most drastic action they have taken has been to raise marginal prices for large consumers, an altogether reserved response to drought. EBMUD's total water deliveries have fallen by one third in the last 50 years, despite the fact that the population in the service area has doubled, and current demand is only half of current supply. Municipal water is about the last thing someone in a Bay Area city needs to worry about.
I did say water for consumption. Lawns are a bad idea and should be replaced with artificial turf or low water grasses. In the droughts throughout the 2000s (I lived through all), water use was curbed down to some PSAs, penalties for watering yards, and shutoff of some public fountains. That is far from a scarcity situation.
I live on the peninsula. We were without power for days. Then, while our power was still out, we got notified that another power outage was coming. We didn’t even know if we’d get power back before the next outage and PGE’s communication was a fat joke and got worse as time went on. (At the beginning you could talk to a human who would give you fairly useful information. By then end it was automated and only the information you could already get online, which was nearly useless.) Our power came back for about a day and then was gone for days again.
You may be overreacting to the evidence.