It's a valiant effort to defend living in SF, at a time when many others are critical of the idea, and I applaud the effort. I am not convinced, but I admire the spirit.
There is even some justification to many of his points. Any essay that makes interesting points and stimulates interesting thoughts, even if by defending a point that I disagree with, is well worth reading.
I can't help noticing, though, that he mostly seems to be contrasting the idea of living in SF with the idea of living in the urban Northeast, or else Miami. It is as if he has never noticed the "flyover country".
I also have the impression that the government in, say, NYC has at least pivoted squarely in the direction of acknowledging and attempting to address the problem(s), whereas SF government has not (or at least if they have it is not apparent from my own, admittedly rather distant, perspective).
Lastly, there have been three office buildings sold in SF recently (the first in years), and they all sold for very steep discounts on previous valuations (>2/3 reduced). As night follows day, every other office building owner in SF is going to go to court to get their property tax valuation reduced. It is not clear to me how SF will cope with the budget cuts that are required.
Flyover country, by and large, is simply not a comparable good with major metropolitan cities. There are a couple of major cities the author didn't mention (Chicago, for example, is lovely), but if you're used to and enjoy urban living, you're not going to find anything like it throughout most of America.
Most American cities are more like San Jose. Sure you've got a big population, but only because what would normally be classified as suburbs have been folded into the municipality, with only relatively small pockets being amenable to the urban life. LA is an interesting case, because it's a lot like the Bay Area as a whole: a cluster of urban spaces, connected by a continuous mass of suburban, single-family homes.
IMO, a simple test of the urban characteristic of a city is a bar crawl. How far can I wander through a city on foot, with a sufficient concentration of bars that it doesn't turn into a hike? For SF, you can make some long crawls: China Town to Fisherman's Wharf is probably my favorite, but if it wasn't for that pesky last call you could easily cross the entire city.
Florida beaches are second to none as far as the continental US is concerned. With a lower cost of living in cities like Tampa versus San Francisco, it's somewhat of a no brainer.
Slightly lower cost of living ($1.9k rent vs. $3.3k) doesn't make it a no brainer when the median Tampa dev will make $106k against the median SF Bay Area dev at $231k.
This is much more realistic to what software eng here can expect to make. And that COL index is laughable, when it's housing is 3.5x SF to Tampa. As median rents, 3.3k to 1.9k show, your actual net cost of housing is nothing like 3.5x. Buying a $1.5m SF home vs. $500k Tampa is as much an investment as it is just a housing cost. Remember, that if real estate appreciation/inflation equals your interest cost, you are effectively only paying 1.25% property taxes, equivalent maintenance, and negligible insurance.
>My numbers come from a far better source, with 1,475 data points
Not at all, levels.fyi is hilariously off, with many junk data points.
Let's settle this once and for all and go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (which captures real compensation from tax returns, payroll, etc.) and see:
Tampa: $110k [0]
San Francisco: $181k [1]
>This is much more realistic to what software eng here can expect to make.
Not at all according to these facts.
>And that COL index is laughable, when it's housing is 3.5x SF to Tampa.
That COL index is sourced from COLI and is recognized by the U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. [2]
>As median rents, 3.3k to 1.9k show, your actual net cost of housing is nothing like 3.5x.
Median rent means nothing when you can rent an entire 2500sqft house in Tampa for less than what it costs to rent a 1000sqft hell hole in SF. COLI factors that in which is exactly why the 3x factor stands.
>Buying a $1.5m SF home vs. $500k Tampa is as much an investment as it is just a housing cost...
Immaterial.
So back to the numbers:
$110k * 1.79 = $196k. You again come out ahead in Tampa, over $15k ahead.
We see folks compare to BLS data a lot, but it’s not an apples to apples comparison. BLS data doesn’t report total compensation, and especially for tech roles, that can leave out a significant chunk of compensation through (liquid) stock grants.
Nope, didn't forget it. The numbers I gave for disposable income are after taxes and median rent. So those have already been factored in and $111k vs. $59k is what you get.
Another way to put it is that in SF you make more money, after taxes and rent, than a dev in Tampa makes gross. $111k disposable income vs. $106k Tampa pre-tax
The city has some awesome unique attributes that make it wonderful in many ways, it also has a big problem its politicians need to address. Both things are simultaneously true, and your opinion on whether it's good or not is based on how highly you weight the two things(or you don't live there and are just making up an opinion based on ideology)
"Two years after the memes began, it seems as if moving Silicon Valley to Miami was largely a COVID-era—and zero interest-rate—phenomenon. Bluntly, many find San Francisco boring. Whatever else it is, Miami is indisputably not boring."
Did they get the two cities switched in that last part?
There is even some justification to many of his points. Any essay that makes interesting points and stimulates interesting thoughts, even if by defending a point that I disagree with, is well worth reading.
I can't help noticing, though, that he mostly seems to be contrasting the idea of living in SF with the idea of living in the urban Northeast, or else Miami. It is as if he has never noticed the "flyover country".
I also have the impression that the government in, say, NYC has at least pivoted squarely in the direction of acknowledging and attempting to address the problem(s), whereas SF government has not (or at least if they have it is not apparent from my own, admittedly rather distant, perspective).
Lastly, there have been three office buildings sold in SF recently (the first in years), and they all sold for very steep discounts on previous valuations (>2/3 reduced). As night follows day, every other office building owner in SF is going to go to court to get their property tax valuation reduced. It is not clear to me how SF will cope with the budget cuts that are required.