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Comment by NatW | Hacker News Reader

I'm an American ruby/python developer living in Paris. The cost of living in Paris is comparable to living in New York City or San Francisco. In some ways it can be cheaper. You can find affordable places to live and work all over Paris, and you can find all kinds of ways to spend or save money in any city.

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I am also an American living in Paris, and while I would agree with you that you can find affordable places, as well as different ways to save money here, the fact is that rents are going up significantly each year. An area like Père Lachaise that would have cost €750/month for 30m2 4 years ago, now costs about €1000/month for the same surface area. I wouldn't say this is due to the so-called 1% (after all, combining several tiny apartments to build one big one is quite rare). I chalk it up to the bobo-fication of areas in East Paris while the west gets gobbled up by the super rich.

I ended up moving to Bagnolet, 500m from the périph (beltway). As soon as your area code changes from 75 to 93, prices often fall by half. Because of the '75 or bust' mindset here, lower earners like myself will be forced to seek a place outside of Paris. But that's not necessarily bad because in the Paris metro area, values are based more on the beginning of your postal code as much as they are on proximity. So while the 93 is associated with a ghetto communist suburb, it affords people like me the ability to take advantage of Parisian stereotypes and score a great deal.

Another American in Paris here. I would say Paris is cheaper than NYC, SF, and London. Unfortunately my salary isn't appreciating nearly as fast as my rent. And when I say rent I really mean the copropriété charges.

"The cost of living in Paris is comparable to living in New York City or San Francisco."

This means that Paris is a very expensive city, as the article was pointing out.

How would compare the salary for that kind of position beetween Paris and SF or NYC, BTW ?

You can live in a nice one-room apartment in Berlin for about 390 euro a month, 15 mins away from the hip boroughs by great public transport, and 10 mins by bike. What's the price like in Paris (honest question)?

I can only speak for NYC having lived there. I paid $1100 for an apartment on Avenue C in the East Village. In Paris, for a comparable area, I'd be hard pressed to find the same space for less than €1000 per month in an area like say, Belleville. Having said that, in NYC, I was making about $60K. In Paris, I make about 30K€.

Wow. It's quite possible to make more than 60K in Berlin (in Euro's) while paying around 400-500 for an apartment. Crazy how much difference there is between cities.

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