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Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

Housing isn’t twice as expensive in San Francisco, it is 10x. Median price per square foot is $129 in Boise, vs $1550 for Palo Alto, or $993 in SF, $1220 SOMA.

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$/sqft isn't a good metric. The correct metric is "what am I actually going to spend on housing?"

This way, the answer begins to change as your family size grows. Which I think is accurate.

How about to rent? Still 10X? A lot more people are looking to rent than to buy (at least straight off anyway).

Looks like around 3-4x. RentCafe gives average SF prices of: studio $2.5k, 1bd $3.2k, 2bd $4.3k. Versus Boise: studio $0.7k, 1bd $0.9k, 2bd $1k.

https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ca/sa... https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/id/ad...

So you need to clear roughly $40K more in pre-tax salary to make up the difference between SF and Boise (accounting for both tax and rent on a studio). That seems doable.

Note that the difference is less if you didn't have a car in SF (or NYC) but need one in Boise.

It does sound doable. I'd probably put the breakeven at closer to $60k pretax for me personally, since I live in a 2bd and don't really want to downsize to a studio, though I realize some people are fine living in studio apts. Depends a lot on the job though. In my line of work (academia), I don't think you could easily get $60k more by moving from a low-CoL to a high-CoL city. From offers I know of, the salary difference is closer to $20k. Even Stanford (which isn't exactly easy to get a job at in the first place) pays only marginally more than comparable universities in low-CoL areas like Georgia Tech, CMU, or UIUC. But I'm sure you could swing a $60k+ raise in some other lines of work.

Yeah, academia is another whole can of words. Apologies if I didn't make it explicit, but I was talking about SWEs. And anecdotally I added a lot more than $60K to my salary by moving to NYC, so I'd have been fine to cover an increased CoL of up to $34K/year; in actuality, it increased by far less than that, less than $10K/year, thanks in large part to saving $600 per month after selling my car which I don't need here. Also, my current employer provides three meals a day, which saves a surprising amount of money (even if I don't eat dinner at the office everyday). That kind of perk simply wasn't available at most tech companies where I moved from.

Speaking of Stanford, one of my coworkers left to go teach there for a year and then came right back. She was actually losing net worth there because they didn't pay her enough for the area, and she didn't want to cut back on her lifestyle and live frugally like one would have to to make a future on that salary. It's sad, but there you go. Maybe there should be a tuition surcharge on CS majors to allow them to actually pay instructors enough to retain them, vs running right back to industry.

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