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Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

You can do the same in the bay area. People who are complaining about how unaffordable the bay area is on six figure salaries are either wanting to be much closer than one hour from hot spots, owning a house, having a kid, or some combination thereof.

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I think the point is that in NYC, you don’t have to be over an hour from the hot spots if you aren’t making lots of money. It is totally possible to live in Manhattan on 30 grand a year (hell, I’ve done it). To do so in San Francisco or the Penninsula would be much harder.

The point of the grandparent was that you could live "less than 60 minutes" from work on over 100k a year.

I don't doubt that someone can live in Manhattan on less than 30k per year -- my wife worked in nonprofit when we met and I saw lots of people she worked with managing to live in salaries that were half of what people on HN regularly decry as being effective poverty for the area. However, when you do a simple search for apartments for rent in Manhattan, studios are routinely around $2k/month.

People wanting to raise a family? How preposterous!

> People wanting to raise a family? How preposterous!

I know! People should be satisfied with the opportunity to change the world (and make me rich) at my startup. Asking for more is kinda greedy. /s.

If not one of those three things are indepdently attainable on a six figure salary, then yes, the Bay Area is massively unaffordable.

The bay area is certainly very high cost of living. But not massively different from New York, which is also very high cost of living.

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