Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a lifelong Californian whose lived in Santa Cruz County for nearly nine out of the past 11 years, and as someone who wants to become a CS professor at a teaching university one day, I feel the exact same way. I love California and I don't want to leave the state. However, the housing prices signal to me that if I want to buy a house, I need to have a very high income and maintain it during the length of a 30-year mortgage. Professors are paid well compared to the average Californian, but professors' salaries are generally not enough to afford to purchase a place in the Bay Area or much of Southern California without involving mega-commutes from exurbia (and, thanks to the WFH boom, these exurbs have gone up in price dramatically). There's still some parts of the Central Valley that are affordable for professors and that are too far for Bay Area/Los Angeles mega-commuters, but the nature of academic hiring means that there's no guarantee a position at a place like UC Merced or Fresno State would open when it's time for me to apply for assistant professor jobs.

If I can't find a place in the next few years that is affordable on an $80,000/year salary in California, then I have to move. I'd like to move to a place where a 3-bedroom house in a safe neighborhood costs no more than $400,000, and where there is a diverse population. Ideally I'd like to live in a place that doesn't get too cold in the winter; I'd rather deal with very hot summers (I grew up in Sacramento where it regularly gets above 100 in the summer) than to deal with cold winters.

Cause of problem: Missing Middle Housing. Not everyone needs the concrete beehives or the single-family-home. But there's been very little built in-between in recent decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing

I could live in very little space. Not into owning a lotta stuff, entertaining crowds. 15x25 is more than enough. Noone's building cottages these days. Let alone on nice streets with trees, away from traffic, walkable. A couple of US cities have opened that up. Neither is in CA. My family of 4 was once quite comfortable in one apt. in a quadplex. We did this to ourselves, and invested in a lot of infrastructure to be locked into.

Echoing others Atlanta is pretty much exactly what you are asking for. I dont think that will stay true for much longer with google and microsofts announced investments there however.

Aren't Californians boycotting Georgia over voting laws?

Not all of us, probably?

Some might be, but the people that are politically rage-quitting CA overlap significantly with the faction that supports those laws.

I wish you luck but even in CS there aren't many tenure track positions open. You might have to move to another state to pursue your career, regardless of housing costs.

I grew up in Atlanta and highly recommend it.

I have some dear Santa Cruz friends with a toddler that just informed us that they are moving to Atlanta next month. Her mother and her entire family grew up near Santa Cruz, but all her siblings have migrated to Atlanta, because of housing, and her mother finally did too. Without family support, they've decided to leave now too.

They have good jobs, just not good enough to rent more than a two bedroom hovel.

This is the story with pretty much any friend that doesn't either come from a family with enough wealth to manage down payments for all the kids, or a crazy-high income from the right type of job.

If we keep in pricing out everyone except for those with family wealth or high incomes, we will lose most of the people that make California great and interesting.

Aren't you concerned that Californians will turn Atlanta into Little California by supporting the policies that caused the problems they are fleeing in the first place?

I wouldn’t necessarily assume that the people who support the policies causing California’s problems are the same ones who are leaving.

> I need to have a very high income and maintain it during the length of a 30-year mortgage

Not short-term helpful, but keep in mind that a mortgage only ever goes down due to both refinances and inflation. So the first few years are tough but it can only gets easier. So you don't need to maintain high income for 30 years.

Sounds like you'd like to live in Texas.

You could try Houston!

Be prepared to offer 10% over listing price. Just bought a house in this market last week. Texas realtors are the real heroes of 2021. I can't imagine having to deliver bad news to 20+ people for every house that touches the market.

You don’t need to maintain a sky high salary during the length of a 30 year mortgage though. You can refinance every 3-5 years to reduce your monthly payment as you pay down the principal.

Your mortgage payment can go down quite significantly over 30 years while paying rent will go up quite significantly over 30 years.

You don’t need to refinance to reduce your payment. You would only refinance to get a better rate or to cash in some home equity. If you prepaid a lot of principle and simply want re-amatorize into a lower payment, you just need to recast your loan, which is pretty cheap (~$300 for my mortgage company).

> Your mortgage payment can go down quite significantly over 30 years while paying rent will go up quite significantly over 30 years.

Very true. This is the key that makes buying so attractive.

Why is owning a house so important that people would move away from family to another state? Seems like there would be more important reasons.

Also, professorships are notoriously difficult to obtain and many professors move to far away rural and otherwise undesirable locations for that “privelege”. I’ve known several distinguished professor couples (not in CA) that live separately to pursue their careers … think twice before taking that route.

The high home prices also mean high rents. It's expensive to live in CA whether you own or rent.

Not owning the house means that your landlord can kick you out at any moment because they can claim that they want to move in. Which means hunting for a new place, which is extremely difficult due to the massive shortage. There are also massive financial benefits of owning a house, for tax purposes, beyond avoiding the yearly increase in rent. This happens even in the cities in California with the highest amount of tenant protections.

Personally, I'd rather pay a property manager to take care of everything rather than have to do it all myself, or have to find landscapers and plumbers and all that other drudgery. But I bought purely for the security that we only provide to those who own their own place.

My point was addressing moving out of state to just buy a house.

However, owning has massive drawbacks like less flexibility to move, increased transaction costs, risk of decline in home value, mortgage costs, home maintenance costs, hoa assessments, etc

Also, taxes on housing increases every year as do maintenance costs, insurance, hoa fees … rents sometimes decrease by the way.

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