What factors cause people to stubbornly remain in an area where decent housing is essentially unaffordable? I genuinely don’t understand this. The Oakland fire stories led me to a series of links about housing in the San Francisco area. I found numerous stories about people living in boxes, vehicles, and even shipping containers. These were folks with (apparently) decent jobs, but they cannot afford even a minimally sufficient dwelling. Here is an example of the stories on this (I’m sure most of the SDMB have read similar tales).
So I ask the board… Why? Decent shelter is a survival necessity, not a luxury. I can’t imagine any factor involving friends, church, entertainment, or “atmosphere” that would be worth trading away basic, safe living quarters.
Just as a thought experiment, here is a decent little house in Lancaster TX renting for $675/month. A similar dwelling* in the San Francisco area rents for $5200 per month. There’s a frieght terminal just down the street from the Lancaster house, and with 4 weeks training (company paid btw) even a truck driver can live there for about 20% of his income. To live on a similar percentage in my SF example would require nearly $300,000 per year. Skipping the percentages and just giving our fictitious San Francisco dweller the same after-rent dollars requires a 6-figure income (~100K) to match his TX counterpart.
Unless you’re really highly paid, San Francisco and many other coastal cities seem to me a foolish choice. I don’t understand the decision to stay in such a financially draining area, especially if it forces you to live in substandard housing. If you have personal knowledge of someone in this situation, enlighten me please.
FTR: None of this should be construed as a condemnation of the victims of the fire. It is a tragedy and is separate from my questions here.
*I realize these probably aren’t similar, I just picked the first 1BR rentals I found in each place. I still think the rental comparisons are valid though.
People value different things. A person who chooses to live in an area with a high cost of living is attracted to the things such an area offers, and they value those things a lot more than having a nice place to live. A lot of times (but not always), this person is young and thus doesn’t mind sleeping under suboptimal conditions for while. Eventually they may get tired of it and move somewhere more affordable, but at least they will always have the experience of living in their favorite city.
Second reason:
A lot of people perceive themselves as having no other choice. I say “perceive” not to belittle this notion, but just to frame it honestly since technically there is always another option. But let’s say you have a secure, stable job. Even if your pay hasn’t kept up with the rising housing costs, it’s a good job (full pension, excellent benefits, flexible hours, management is decent, etc.) Yeah, you could bail out the first time you can’t make your rent. Or, you could find a roommate. And when that doesn’t work anymore, maybe you adjust to living in a studio apartment. And then when that doesn’t work anymore, maybe you decide to go the RV route. I suppose at some point, people in this situation will reach their limit. But perhaps in their mind, they’re in control of the situation as long as they keep their job.
I visit a subreddit that is targeted to economically wayward 20-somethings (a demographic I do not belong to, but I find some of the commentary posted there interesting). A lot of the posters have it in their minds that high cost of living = jobs. Especially technical positions. In some ways, they are right. Staying out in Bumfuck, Egypt is not going to land a person a good job. But most major cities in the US are not “Bumfuck”. Nor are they like San Francisco or NYC. But folks want to maximize their chances of success. Which is understandable. But then they also want to complain that they will never be able to buy a house where they live, which is when I start rolling my eyes a little.
In my case I was young and single with no family responsibilities. The place was literally a place ton sleep, shit, shave, shower and pack my stuff. Most of the time I was out.
Second, don’t underestimate gow vital support networks can be: the sister that watches your kids, the brother that splits rent with you, the grandmother that can always loan you $200 at no interest for a week or two when you need groceries. Furthermore, having these networks means being part of these networks: you do grandma’s shopping because she can’t drive, your brother can’t make the rent if you move out, you watch your sister’s kids, too. Moving to a random location where you have no network is terrifying. Abandoning the people you help is terrible.
Third, lots of people in those sorts od situations have ine lucky break they can’t replicate. A good job they aren’t technically qualified for because they worked their way up, and don’t think they can get hired with no paper qualifications. A mother in law who provides free childcare. A job close enough that you don’t need a car. A rent well below market. It’s just enough to make life possible, and if you try anything new, you lose it and can’t get it back.
Finally, when you live month to month, you don’t have the ability to dave the money to move. A cross country move has to cost several thousand, either to move your stuff or to replace it, pay deposits and transportation.
I first worked as a computer programmer, then as a lecturer for a large company in London.
Hideously expensive :eek: , so I lived with my parents* and saved up for a deposit.
Just when I could afford to buy in London (it took me 14 years to afford a one bedroom property :smack:), a job came up on the South Coast.
Housing was way cheaper (better property for 66% of London costs) so I bought a 2 bedroom flat (US = apartment, I think.)
Later on I got a wonderful job offer in a small country town - so I sold up and bought a 3 bedroom house.
I turned down a significant raise specifically to avoid living or working in greater Dallas. Lancaster is generic edge suburb of Dallas. 15 years ago it was all scrub land and a couple of 1950s crossroads. 15 years from now the nearest open land will be 20 miles father out.
The only thing worse than living in/near Dallas is living in rural Texas. I’ll gladly drop nearly 6 figures annually extra to avoid that.
Bottom line: different folks value different stuff.
Thanks everyone for your responses so far. You’re shedding some light on the mystery for me.
I see your point here, about slowly boiling the frog. I can see how folks are reluctant to leave an incrementally declining situation, especially with the pension/benefits angle. These jobs are hard to replicate anywhere, no matter the housing market.
These are good points Manda JO. I’ll skip the reasons for now, but my wife and I have never had a support network like you describe. Maybe that’s why moving never seemed particularly worrisome to us. We’ve moved frequently for economic reasons, and I count at least 6 (DFW, Rotterdam, Seattle, Phoenix, Aberdeen, and Monroe LA) where we arrived without knowing a single soul in the town. Perhaps I’m underestimating the importance of networks to most people, but I certainly wouldn’t call it “terrifying”. As far as moving expenses, in some of the situations in the links (when you’re living in a storage container) there’s almost nothing to move. It seems like it would be relatively cheap.
I understand the reason for your choices, but I’m guessing yours was trading house size for some other component of the area you’ve settled in. I’m asking about people who seem to be choosing a lifestyle component over financial solvency. They’re either choosing to live in near 3rd world huts, or condemning their entire earnings to housing. This is the part that mystifies me. I’m not condemning it, but I’m still curious what aspect of life in SF (or other city) is worth this level of sacrifice.
It’s not terrifying to you because obviously you don’t depend on a whole bunch of people for emotional and financial support.
But a lot of people do.
And for a lot of people, it’s not just that they are afraid of moving away from family and friends. It’s that their family and friends actively discourage them from moving away. I was fortunate that my parents didn’t try to guilt-trip me into staying close to home when I set out for graduate school. I probably would have to succumbed to the pressure if they had.
@pullin: I sort of agree with your last point / question. I like SF, have extended family there, but would never choose to live there unless I’d bought 40 years ago. IOW, it has truly world-class excellent performance but a price/performance ratio beyond my tolerance.
Two thoughts:
The folks really living in shipping containers are a tiny, tiny minority of the folks living in the e.g. Bay Area. But definitely a newsworthy or comment-worthy minority.
What do we really learn about a place from interviewing people on the 1/100th of one percent fringe? Or about the motivations of the other 99.99%?
Another factor is the winner-take-all effect that’s slowly overwhelming our economy. The reality in many industries is lagging the PR about that reality. But people, particularly educated young people believe they have two choices: Be a star in their field or be long term underemployed with many bouts of outright unemployment. So 95% of the people are chasing the 10% of “good” jobs in their field, believing that the other 90% of jobs are dead-end off ramps to unemployment.
And 100% of those 10% good jobs are located in the big city. Dallas or Houston if you’re in oil, Bay area or maybe Seattle if you’re in IT, NY or maybe Chicago if you’re in finance. etc. So they all crowd there regardless of the drawbacks.
This is utterly unlike the world when I was growing up and in college where pretty much every industry was available in every city and all employers paid about the same within any industry for most jobs requiring similar levels of education. And in an era where that first career-level job was the last one you needed. You could change companies if you wanted to, or to jazz up your career path a bit. But it was almost never necessary and almost never involuntary.
That world was collapsing just as I was getting into industry. I had to run to catch the caboose and have been barely holding on by my fingertips ever since. With occasional falls and sprints to grab that ever-faster receding railing again.
A friend from college was interviewed by Texas Instruments for a job in Johnson City, TN. He asked them what kind of restaurants they had in town, and the interviewer thought for a moment and said, “well, we have a Red Lobster.” My friend didn’t take the job, instead opting for a position in the Bay Area, where there was some actual culture.
It’s not even that. For some people, it’s more comfortable and a lot safer to be surround by your own culture. If you’re Korean, it’s nice to have Korean markets nearby. Same if you’re Chinese or Indian. Lots of Ethnic distributions in the large Cities.
My wife and I are a librarian and a lawyer. Washington DC is super expensive, but it offers career opportunities for both of us that are difficult to replicate elsewhere.
However much better the opportunities are in big cities for upper half single-earners, it’s hugely moreso for a two-earner couple who/re both in the upper half or upper quartile. And the higher you go, the more that’s true.
Rent in Lancaster Texas is cheap because few people want to live there and for good reasons. The only people for whom it seems to make sense economically to move to Lancaster-type places are those with no particular skills who are going to be janitors/waitresses/etc.
Can you fight my ignorance on the different career opportunities for librarians? The only career specialization/upgrade I’m aware of for librarians is ordinary librarian vs legal librarian. Does a lvl 20 librarian have the power to shhh them all?
I’m curious about your response. I’ve spent most of my life living in Kansas City and Indianapolis. Both have a long history of having large pharmaceutical companies in them (Merrell Dow left KC in 2006, but Eli Lilly remains a strong company (despite a massive blow to their stock this year when their Alzheimer’s med didn’t get approved) in Indy). Pharma companies are spread throughout the country, and aren’t necessarily concentrated in the cities that the OP is talking about.
However, I certainly have gaps in knowledge on the industry - it’s not one in which I’ve been employed. Are the Silicon Valley companies that much above and beyond the ones in smaller cities?
This raises another important point. Many good reasons have already been given for why someone would choose to move to, or remain in, an expensive city, but there’s also the fact that for many of the residents – I’d venture to say the majority of the homeowners – it isn’t actually expensive, and you don’t necessarily have to go back 40 years. In many areas the most astronomical housing price increases have been relatively recent, so many who bought into the market merely 20, or in some cases just 10 or even 5 years ago, have locked into essentially fixed-price mortgages that are completely decoupled from what the real estate market is doing. So in any large city that’s experienced a rapid rise in housing costs you’ll have a majority of homeowners who aren’t actually paying anywhere near the market cost of housing, many of whom probably couldn’t even afford to live there if they were renters or first-time buyers.
In the case of San Francisco, it seems that the rapid rise in housing costs is partly the result of the tech boom and the influx of moneyed tech entrepreneurs. Alexandra Pelosi did a documentary on the subject called San Francisco 2.0 in which she explores how the city’s unconventional artistic and counterculture communities are being displaced and some of its historic character transformed by the influx of all this new money.
My background is research. I do discovery work (the earliest stages of drug discovery which is basically coming up with the idea in the first place) through early clinical stage research. My own idea from about ten years ago is now in clinical studies, but I’m largely not involved in it anymore as it is getting into later stage clinical work.
There aren’t a lot of regions that do this preclinical drug research and development. The big two, which represent the vast majority of this research, are Boston and San Francisco (not Silicon Valley, by the way.). Some in San Diego and Jersey. A smattering in a few other places (Seattle and such). Pharma companies are spread throughout the country, but just because Eli Lilly has a building in a city doesn’t mean that there are bench scientists like me in there doing early stage research. Most of the Lilly work Indianapolis is going to be formulation work and such, which isn’t anything like what I do.
I worked on that Lilly antibody a little bit ages and ages ago. Long before it was clinical and long before Lilly bought it.