Yeah "money is not everything" but I'd be able to do more things I like if I had house and spacious garage. But that's $$, $$$ if I also want to live in place with reasonable commute
My house is 2000 square feet. I have a recording studio and a wood shop and too many 3D printers. I am getting a garage permitted for another ~800 square feet. The place cost $480,000 four years ago and is around $620,000 now on Zillow. I am a fifteen minute walk from a train and can be in downtown Boston within the hour.
There are ways to get what you want other than "be an extremely unlikely curve-breaker of a success". It frequently means "not being in San Francisco or New York", granted, but...you've got options.
Im glad for you but I don't think you are making the point you intended.
But I don’t expect the person to whom I replied to be concerned with individually solving it either, and so while I think we can solve our own problems while being mindful of our society’s, the latter didn’t seem appropriate here.
You don't really need a graph to understand that change...
Good on you for fucking with the NIMBYs though, they're the reason house prices went up by an insane amount.
My house, on a 30-year, 10% down, if bought today at the Zillow valuation + my property taxes and insurance, would be about $3800/month. That is absolutely not nothing, but the same square footage in Alameda, CA--a better substitute in some ways, esp. re: transit--is in the $1mil to $1.25mil range, which would be more like $7500/month (if you could make the 10% down at all).
Given that staff+ compensation in the Boston area is pretty reliably north of $200K these days, these are much friendlier numbers. And again, Boston is still an expensive area! There's lots of places in the country that are cheaper. I use Boston as an example because even on the edge of the suburbs there's still decent-to-good public transit. Go just down the road to Providence, which has a thriving local scene of its own and is still on the commuter rail to Boston but otherwise kinda lacks local public transit, and you can get a house like mine that's roughly as walkable to the basics (restaurants, supermarkets, etc.) for like $380K. And if your job is in Boston you can still be at South Station in under an hour and a half of sitting on a train that, IMO, beats BART and CalTrain pretty solidly, let alone driving (which I've known a lot of people, historically, to do from Providence--and that seemed awful).
Me, I work mostly-remote, so I'm not tied to being here in the first place. I just like it here. But realizing that there are significant options is important.
My hobbies take up a lot of space so I understand what you want. We had to move out of an in town location to get the house we wanted. A 1,000sqft in town house the same size as our duplex rental wasn’t going to cut it.
Luckily I was able to find jobs in an area 45 minutes away from downtown with virtual worker status (3-5 days a month in office max). I changed jobs and was able to find many other ones in the same area.
There's a lot of great places out there. Believing that we have to all cluster around a few cities is pretty bad for us.
The West Coast does have a higher employment of Software Developers per 1,000 people. Especially SF/San Jose. Texas seems to be increasing more than other areas outside of California and Washington.
It doesn't. Money buys comfort, power, prestige, security, ..., but not happiness. A happy person is a happy person. An unhappy person is an unhappy person. It sucks in a way but from a different pov it is a wonderful equalizing fact of human experience (like the bliss of orgasm, available to poor and rich alike).