Serious question as someone who doesn't live in the US: where do (lower salary) non-tech workers live in SF?
I'm talking about the fast food workers, retail shop assistants, cleaners in the Google offices, etc. How are these people able to afford the average monthly SF rent on their hourly wages?
My wife works in mountain view and her co-workers drive from Oakland or out past Gilroy. If they live nearby, 2 incomes and multigenerational living helps.
It's pretty easy to find rent sub-1500/mo, which is definitely affordable for most folks, but you obviously need to taper your expectations. Minimum wage around here is +$20/hr.
would people have any tax advantage for commuting this long? For example, in Germany, you would be able to claim about 30 cents per kilometer (one way) for your commute on your tax return.
Otherwise, is the salary gap so big that people would not be better off working closer to home?
I don't think such a thing exists in the US. If anything, California taxes you for every mile you drive via the highest gas taxes in the county (which in classic California fashion, hurts the poorest among us).
No. Businesses can deduct mileage by personal vehicle usage (now $0.655 per mile)[1] , and so if I'm on a "work trip' and use my personal car, typically I will get reimbursed by my employer at that same rate. And if I was self-employed, of course, I would get that tax deduction.
However, personal vehicle use is not tax-deductible for individuals.
All of the complaints listed here (hot weather, shit-tier public transit, etc) were true of Austin prior to the Great Migration.
Everyone wanted in though because Austin is the first place people think of when they think of Texas, it's the only major city in Texas with rolling hills, it's perceived as the only non-conservative city in Texas (it is not), 6th St and Barton Springs are fun, and Texas has no income tax and cheap real estate.
Now that real estate prices in Austin are significantly higher than they were in the past, a self-induced problem BTW!, and the Real Texas Heat™ has finally come, folks want to move back. (Property tax rates in Texas have always been high, and they only go up every year.)
Austin was always a small town with Texas government and a huge school with a huge American football team (UT Austin). I don't think it was designed with the explosive growth that it has seen in the last 15 years.
Its road design is proof of this. US Interstate 35 cuts right through town and it only has one partial ring road (TX-130). It also has the MoPAC (TX-1), though that expanded and, consequently, became a partial toll road.
Compare this with Houston, where I live. It has three huge interstates going through it (US I-10 east-west; US-45 north-south; Texas I-69/US Hwy 59 SW-NE), one huge and constantly problematic interstate beltway (US I-610) and two state ring roads (TX-8; TX-99). It is designed to accommodate and move a significant population (or significant freight, which it does also).
Austin has always been overrated IMO.
Houston is way bigger, more liberal and diverse (in every dimension, not just race, but it is extremely racially-integrated) than Austin has ever been and has a world-class food scene but gets 1/10th of the hype because...actually, I have no idea why?
Dallas is also way bigger than Austin and actually has a tech scene of sorts (though it is old and enterprise-y) along with more moderate (but still hot) weather but didn't boom like Austin did. Why?
Houston has always had a bad reputation for hot, humid weather. We're talking oppressive heat. Add hurricanes to the mix. Harvey wasn't that long ago and we remember the massive flooding. No thanks.
Austin doesn't have that problematic weather. Their temperature is a few degrees cooler than Houston, and their humidity is a few percentage points lower. It may not be much, but every bit helps. Though Austin also got hit by Harvey, they didn't get hit as bad.
Austin also has a great music scene that's nationally recognized. Austin is a major league music city for producing well-known artists.
Austin is cool, Houston is not. It's really that simple.
What Austin lacks though, as you mention, is infrastructure. I know of many cities across the U.S. that are 1/3 to 1/2 the size of Austin and has more infrastructure. Not just highways and roadways - they lack conference space, they lack terminals at their airport, they have very little public transit - it's pretty bad considering the size of the population.
Between Houston and Austin, Austin wins it hands-down. It's a great place to visit, though I wouldn't live in either city.
Only coming here to comment as someone in tech who did some informal comparisons during the height of the pandemic.
Probably the biggest thing Austin seemed to have going for it is the combo of tech+diversity+what seem to be outdoor activities. Lake Travis looked tempting. [1]
Houston probably has tech+diversity but there's no outdoor placemaking.
Dallas probably has some tech+some diversity+slightly more outdoor activities.
San Antonio/Hill country seems like it might have some placemaking but no Tech and less diversity.
[1] The Oasis on Lake Travis
Discover Austin: The Oasis - Austin Eats
A few hot summers in Austin can really highlight the value of San Francisco's milder climate and access to water. Both cities have their perks, but these factors tip the scale.
Knowing about a phenomenon and experiencing for oneself are sometimes two different things. The article also cites record-high temperatures which presumably they didn't have foreknowledge of if they've never happened before.
So, tech workers paid >200k couldn't anticipate that hot places are going to get a lot hotter due to global warming and all the trends we've been observing over the last decade or so? Interesting.
Knowing something and experiencing it are two different things.
Everyone moving there knows it gets hot. But if you've never experienced 100F heat - especially not days in a row - you have little to compare it to. Theoretical knowledge compared to applied knowledge. Heck, even if you have experienced it, you probably did it in completely different conditions. For example, the Midwest gets hot sometimes, but that heat is different and lasts shorter times than it tends to in Austin. (Which is also the reason folks moving from Arizona to Indiana get shocked at the heat + humidity combination or why 80F near the arctic feels warmer than it does in some other places)
Smart people can be in denial about the climate. I know one nuclear physicist who still doesn’t believe in climate change. (And so is pushing for the adoption proof-of-work crypto.)
I hadn't realized when I composed this that Yellowknife's entire population was recently evacuated because of wildfires, which I guess is the other issue with being "smart:" easier said than done.
Here [1] is a site with a bunch of various weather records for Austin. Assuming the climate is warming then, on average, literally every month should be the hottest month ever recorded. But it doesn't mean it's some night and day difference where suddenly temperatures just spike in ways never before seen.
Austin has long historic temperature ranges well above 100. The highest temperature (112) was recorded in 2000. It gets really hot. The record for the number of days > 100F was set in 2011, at 74. It also gets really cold. The record for the most number of freezing days was also recently set in 2022, with 51.
So? Tech workers commute from their air-conditioned houses in their air-conditioned cars to their air-conditioned offices, then shop in air-conditioned stores--then back to their air-conditioned houses. So they only need to spend a small amount of time in the heat.
I'm sure this article is a data-driven approach as full of journalistic integrity as the ones 2 years ago about everyone fleeing California, and definitely not just a cheap clickbaity attempt at schadenfreudeporn.
The look at my notions and biases comment instead of providing anything supporting your statement. If you don't make tons of money and want to abuse the tax system there is no real incentive to move to Austin and a lot of people just realize that. It's the same pattern the streaming community took. Move to Austin be happy about the money and mad about everything else.
Not the same issue, though it is still because of Cloudflare's shenanigans.
One affects their DNS resolution of archive.is, GP is talking about Cloudflare's endless captcha portal on that site. Strangely enough, it works for me today, but a few days ago I couldn't get past that obnoxious screen.
I just wish people would stop flocking to Cloudflare and making the internet even shittier than it is.
So, is archive.today served exclusively by Cloudflare, optionally by Cloudflare where you can access directly, or has Cloudflare stolen their TLS private keys?
Cloudflare can't point me to their own servers when I access https://archive.today unless my browser confirms that the server it's talking to (the one serving the CAPTCHAs) has archive.today's certificate's private keys.
I did read about that, and it has nothing to do with the problem the OP was raising. If you try to resolve archive.is with 1.1.1.1, you get a bogus IP and don't reach any HTTP server at all.
This doesn't explain why some would see a huge amount of CAPTCHA served by archive.is or archive.today if they do reach an IP that serves the right TLS certs, but only if they got that IP from 1.1.1.1 instead of getting it from 8.8.8.8 or wherever.
Texas became a pretty unsafe place for lgbtq people. Austin has historically maintained an open and friendly atmosphere for people of all stripes. But a friendly city in a dangerous state is still a dangerous place to live if you are queer.
In California, we see a variety of policies operating in concert to restrict housing supply. Tokyo is also a desirable place to live but they've managed housing affordability there much better. In California you have all of the following operating together to restrict housing supply:
* Property tax policy that strongly favors not selling and not renovating;
* Numerous private rights of action that people can bring against new developments;
* State and municipal agencies with a wide variety of rules available to them that can serve as a basis for obstructing new developments;
* Large areas of the state that have been declared "open space" by various towns and cities.
That's what struck me too about the article: tens of thousands of newly arrived tech workers complaining about the lack of a tech scene and moving. They're treating "scene" as something that should just be there for them to consume, rather than something that they could potentially create. They might look at each other and say "Hey, we are the tech scene, all it takes is some socializing."
So you propose they all start businesses in the place they've realized has a much weaker tech scene than they imagined when they came with no intention of doing that? Moving seems smarter.
Being the first in the world to offer up some product or service you've come up with is not the only path to entrepreneurship. In fact, on a risk-adjusted expected-value basis, it may not even be a particularly smart way of going about getting there.
An alternative is to take something that has been tried and tested elsewhere that's not easy to move from place to place, and just go to a place where there's high potential demand and not yet any supply, and offer it there.
The picture in my mind is: There's this guy dreaming about becoming a billionaire by setting up "tinder for pets", but now he can't do that. His problems are: There are no high-profile speakers at local tech conferences, internet connections at cafes suck, and grocery stores do not carry his favourite caffeinated beverage.
So, why not do that? Invite some high-profile speakers to local tech conferences. Partner with local cafes to provide better internet. Set up a distribution channel for a caffeinated beverage. If that's the situation he's in, there's a pretty good chance that any of that is probably a more useful thing to do than "tinder for pets".
Mass migrations are ripe with economic opportunity, it's just a different kind of economic opportunity.
The problems of Austin are hard. The problems of SF are impossible. (Or so it feels to me, an outsider to both places.)
But I think these people weren't trying to move to a place where the problems were at least solvable. They were trying to move to a place without problems. That isn't Austin (or anywhere, really). Not finding what they were looking for, they bailed.
No one wants to improve Austin because the only reason they come to Austin is that they don't need to pay taxes. That's why Rogan and all the twitch streameres are there do you believe it's because of their love of the city? They are out of there if they gets a bigger tax break somewhere else. They are parasites.
Other than grad school (and a few years as a toddler), I’m a life-long Texan and a former resident of Austin many, many, (urp) many years ago. Even then, Austin was becoming increasingly lame over time. It’s still a fun place to visit occasionally - better scenery than Houston! - but the fun, chill, outdoorsy, live music scene has been twisted into some sort of bizarre playground for sheikh failsons, libertarians who couldn’t hack it in California and the low-tax pilgrims who stepped on the rake of our very high property taxes (and suspiciously low services, but that’s neither here nor there). And the whole vibe of the city is strange - it’s generation after generation of adults who live like they’re still in their 20s, forever and ever - and not in the good, young-at-heart way. More like the “trivia night, then ultimate, then pub crawl” circuit every week well into their 50s. Maybe later!
The way I feel about Austin is if the smartest, most interesting girl in your high school class turned into a trophy wife soccer mom who … lives in the hills outside of Austin. It’s an appealing life in some - many - ways, but so, so vacuous and, in my mind, just not that interesting at all.
Maybe it’s a projection of the journalist, that this is sufficient material for wanting to move or not, and they stopped enquiring as soon as they confirmed their bias?
I mean, there are issues with Texas and we are seeing some people relocating or seriously considering it.
The author ignored a whole range of more serious issues about services and safety and symbol-politics and instead mentions things like "not enough museums"...
I'm talking about the fast food workers, retail shop assistants, cleaners in the Google offices, etc. How are these people able to afford the average monthly SF rent on their hourly wages?