Comments on: “You can’t buy a place for…”

By: walt

walt — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 20:04:02 +0000

Well…some parts of the Bay Area really do require air conditioning, e.g. here in Livermore. (Last summer, the AC probably ran less than 12 hours total, but that’s unusual–and we keep it set at 80 during the day, higher at night.) “Crazy car maintenance” is an interesting point: I think you see a lot more well-maintained very old cars around here because they don’t have to deal with salt on the roads.

Still, as to cost of living: beyond real estate, I’m still not sure I see it.

By: rcn

rcn — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 19:44:28 +0000

In response to Blake, it’s true that cost of living – especially real estate – is high here, but most salaries are also higher than elsewhere. Although a career as a public librarian doesn’t pay nearly as much as one in high tech, it’s higher than in the rest of the U.S. And real estate has come down considerably in the past year or two. I’m with Walt – having moved here from the Midwest, I have no desire to return to cold winters requiring expensive home heating systems, extra clothing costs, and crazy car maintenance – not to mention hot, humid summers requiring expensive cooling systems.

rcn in SF Bay Area

By: Christina Pikas

Christina Pikas — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 03:15:38 +0000

Milk here – if you don’t go to Costco, on a bad week? $3.49/gallon for skim. It varies a lot by week.
Houses are pretty expensive, too. Can get 1100 square feet on a quarter acre lot near me for $350k.

By: walt

walt — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 16:18:51 +0000

Well, there are places for under $100/sqft, in Daly City at least (which is typically cheaper than either South San Francisco or San Bruno, and still closer than SF itself)–but they’re either foreclosures or manufactured homes/mobile homes. (E.g., here’s one for $114,000, a 1,248-sqft 2&2, pretty clearly a manufactured home.)

It works both ways. As a wimpy native Californian, I don’t see how anyone can live through the winters in the Northeast & Midwest… and yet, you do. The answer here is: (a) you move further out–e.g., my wife’s niece bought a good-size recently-built house for $175K in Oakdale, which is about 60 miles east, (b) you have two salaries, (c) precious few of us have “vacation homes” (or need them), (d) or some other mechanism. Fact is, all of the cities I’ve mentioned are in the West Bay, an unusually expensive part of California.

My main point was that “You can’t buy anything for less than $700,000″ is sheer nonsense: It overstates the situation even in the more expensive areas. Not the *most* expensive areas… It’s like saying that you can’t buy a decent house in New York for less than $1 million, which might be true for Midtown Manhattan but is absurd for, say, Potsdam.

By: Blake

Blake — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 02:13:35 +0000

I still don’t understand how anyone can live there. $100/sqft is high around here.