All of this is tied together, and came about through racism and Interstates.
White flight to the suburbs, aided by car culture, made big beautiful bedroom communities all over this land, all a “convenient” commute away from the office buildings and department stores, 50 or 60 years ago.
Now, all those suburbs have grown their own office buildings and shopping areas, and are perfectly liveable, if you have a car.
There’s a lot to be said about urban areas, if you’re looking for
but that’s dependent on neighborhoods and public transit, if you don’t have a car.
It’s all about the car in America, and tech workers can afford cars.
While most of those are suburbs (really exurbs), Redding is definitely not. It’s hardcore rural MAGA country, probably not the best place to put your money.
They can afford a car, but I find a lot of younger people I know in the tech industry just don’t want to own one anymore if they don’t have to. They understand that a car is just an expensive depreciating asset that sits idle 90% of the time, costs them hundreds of dollars a month to maintain, and (for internal combustion engines) contributes to global warming.
What I suspect is going on here is that tech workers with young families are the ones that are moving out of the cities – that’s the case of my friend’s brother, mentioned above. At that point keeping a car with all its costs makes more sense, especially if you’re also getting more SQF of housing for your dollar.
Fresno itself is the city, with museums and a zoo. And has with outlying towns like Clovis as part of its metro area. And Merced is loosely grouped as part of a larger Modesto area.
Here’s a street in a Fresno suburb near usual amenities like grocery stores and strip malls. Most of the houses on this street are “z-estimate” below $200k, and a few on a nearby street have a list price under $250k.
I included in little towns like Milford because you can find little tightly packed suburb-like communities in the middle of no where. For those purely telecommuting it’s potentially attractive. but I didn’t intend it as the center of my argument, and I suppose I should have left that distraction out of the discussion.
Good deals in San Jose on homes would be an older home, not a manufactured home. No “rent” and no HOA fees that way. Sub-500k in San Jose is quite easily found depending on criteria, sub-$400k is hard. (my old SJ house was sub-$400k when I bought it several years ago, but it was above that when I sold it. still worth well below SJ’s median of $1m)
I have relatives in Clovis that I visit often, and I agree that it’s relatively affordable compared to other parts of California if you’ve got a decent income but that’s one hell of a stipulation. Fresno is not exactly a Tech industry hot spot. The main industry in Fresno and the surrounding areas is agriculture (same for Modesto), so the affordability of its homes should be viewed from the perspective of an agricultural worker. Most of them don’t make your assumed $15/hr. According to the census the per-capita income for a Fresno resident is just $23,834 a year, which is just 70% of the national per-capita income. At the same time, their median home price is above the national median of $226k. So, no, I don’t agree with your premise that it’s especially affordable for working class people, based on the working class people who actually live there.
The math works out more like this. per-capita in a two income household, with one child … that’s $72k/yr on average or an hourly rate of about $18/hr.
For more accurate than an extrapolation as above would be the household income. Average in Fresno is $53k/yr. Which goes back to the estimates of my earlier post.
It’s totally fine if you don’t find living in Fresno or whatever all that appealing. Plenty of my working class friends and family live in small cities. (not that Fresno is small, it’s the 5th largest in California, but it has that small city feel to it)
As for commute to “tech industry hot spot”. My understanding on the topic thread is that people are leaving NYC and Silicon Valley for cheaper cities. Not necessarily tech hubs, but places where tech people can work remotely and have access to a similar level of infrastructure at a fraction of the price.
The average income of any given location doesn’t tell an accurate story. A few rich farm owners or a single billionaire can significantly skew an average. Which is why the median income is a far more useful when looking at how affordable a city is.
Bottom line: if the median income for a city is 30% less than the national average, and the median home price in that same city is above the national average, there’s no way you’re going to convince me that housing is affordable for most working class people who live there. And that‘s the last I have to say about Fresno.
I moved to Austin 16 years ago to go to grad school. I had some family in Austin, San Antonio and the Gulf Coast, but I was ultimately a transplant. After school I stayed to work in a tech-adjacent field. I met my future wife in 2009 on a flight back from mainland China when she was about to move from Fort Worth to work for a company in Austin. She has family in Austin, Mexico, Panama and Japan. Austin is our home now. We bought a modest home and intend to remain. I’ve lived here longer than anywhere else in my life by far. I recognize that in a sense I’m part of the problem - I’m not being sarcastic - since the influx of tech contributed greatly to the gentrification of Austin.
The city planning for affordable housing and transportation has roundly been a failure, but there’s also a ton of tech workers who are ambivalent about being here and haven’t put down roots. I don’t really blame them. Sure, they’re doing knowledge work, but they’re not necessarily making more than skilled laborers and they’re not exactly living the high life. Most of them are a thin margin above any reasonable definition of working class, and they do work for a living. I blame the companies (including the major one I work for) that decided to turn Austin into the Silicon Valley of the south.
And to echo you and others, I blame a nation that commoditizes housing.
I know this isn’t what you were saying, but there’s been a lot of resentment in Austin against transplants. I even see it in people who moved here after I did and resent newer arrivals. I’m not totally unsympathetic - higher density in poor urban planning drives up housing costs - but it also rhymes a little too much with anti-immigrant sentiment for me to be totally comfortable with. I don’t like gentrification, but like you said, it’s not the individual workers who are to blame.
Yep, and a lot of it sits empty for years because hedge funds parked capital in them, chopped them into mortgage backed securities and made it uneconomical to let anyone other than big corporations that want a NYC status store to rent or buy them. Same for SF, London and it’s stating to take hold in Austin. I dread the coming real estate crisis as the domino effect of treating housing as a commodity comes home to roost for the second time in as many decades.
they didn’t drive up the prices, the rentiers/landlords did. Maybe where you live people bid for rent but for the rest of us, we pay what it says on the ad.
the underlying question is, will rents fall and by how much? and when will cities realize that those rents are reflection of the investment of working people at every pay level, that location has value, and that land owners should be assessed a ground rent for their use of the land.
Affordable housing is impossible without affordable land and ground rents/land value taxes are one way to get there. Thos. Paine explained this in 1797 (Agrarian Justice) and it’s long past time cities realized he was right.
I see the “/s” there - but I think think there’s actually somewhat of a case for this point to be made in earnest to a degree. In the Bay Area at least there’s a bit of a Company Town dynamic going on - where the same establishment that rents out a lot of the housing (that they likely paid off in the 80’s or 90’s - and due to Prop 13 haven’t seen any increase in taxes on, (and the underfunded local schools they don’t use or actually live near are imploding)), is the very same group that includes the managerial types who set those high salaries that largely end up going right back to the landlords.
Same as it ever was since the gold rush times, and the dust bowl migrations - Woodie knew.
Much of this housing stock here is in disrepair, esp. considering the rates - more and more it’s looking like a musical chairs game with everyone eyeing the exits as the roads crumble and hillsides burn due to collapsing 100 year utility towers that hit their 110 yr expiry date.
This checks out - in a weird reversal S.F. has turned into a bedroom community for workers who commute down the peninsula (to what used to be the hinterlands) in the maligned charter buses (which do indeed help ameliorate the already critical congestion, but represent a sort of icky privatization of public space in a hotly contentious zone). I used to drive that stretch a decade or so ago - thankful not to be dealing with it daily at the current levels.
and the reason is that the value is in the land. A parcel of empty land in SF or Seattle will rise in value with not effort on the part of the owner. Getting wage slaves to pay off the mortgage or fund the purchase of another derelict building is the landlord’s game. Rentier capitalism is a thing. The solution is to assess a tax on the land itself, forcing unused or underused parcels into productive use which will put pressure on slumlords to keep up their property.
None of this is new. Look up the works of the Prophet of San Francisco and prepare to be disappointed at how the game has been run.
Are you sure that undeveloped land isn’t already subject to property tax? I’m pretty sure that it is in California. Of course, due to prop 13 the owners may be paying next to nothing if they acquired the land at the right time, but that’s the case for developed properties as well.
If you’re talking about a new, additional tax on top of the existing property tax, how would that work, exactly? Who gets to decide if a property is “underused?” If a particular plot of residential real estate only has a two story house when a four-story condo could fit there, do they get penalized? How about someone who owns a house with a back yard or garden that could be built upon?
Also, I think you might be overestimating the amount of undeveloped land in San Francisco that’s zoned for residential development. Market forces long ago led to people building on steep hillsides, sand dunes, and other challenging terrain that would never be economically feasible in most other cities. Even if every empty plot of land in the city suddenly got a new house built on it and every empty house got tenants, I don’t think it would increase S.F.’s overall housing stock by a significant percentage.
Having just recently gone through a job hunt in a non-tech (though highly technical) field, I can say that some large companies now “get it” and others don’t. I had that conversation directly with the hiring manager in one of my interviews. Why eliminate the 20-ish% (on the low end) of experienced, qualified candidates who 1. Aren’t local, and 2. Aren’t interested in relocating, when you’re going to have them travel 25-50% of the time and you’re a global company with locations in almost every time zone?
That trend has been ongoing for the past 20-ish years there. Before remote tech work became really feasible, it was people from Silicon Valley who cashed out their home, bought a mansion in Oregon for a fraction of the price, and semi-retired. Or the same thing, but instead of selling their house, did the same when their startup hit exit. Or both.
For all the talk here about relocating from NY or CA to some place cheaper in a small town or a cabin in the woods, I am not hearing much discussion about internet connectivity. Getting a very clear spec on connectivity options and costs before moving, as well as bandwidth consumption demands, is a big deal.
Our family is made of tech workers.
For quite a while (decades), our always-a-work-from-home home had had ~8 dialup modems+landlines, then ISDN, then a T1 line, then a bonded T1 connection (for our servers plus our entire neighborhood… which we hand-trenched and wired ourselves up to the demarc and sometimes into people’s houses at their request) before Charter made the whole neighborhood an offer in 2017 and put DH and myself out of our misery as the only broadband ISP here.1
VOIP, streaming, VPNs and more were only the beginning of our suffering. We had to go with a metered and tiered fee structure because some people hogged the entire pipe and we couldn’t afford to keep adding more pipe capacity without doubling or tripling our monthly fees to customers.2
I digress.
Chewing on an upgrade in living situations, I was looking at which areas in the U.S. have fiber broadband:
Sure, there’s cable broadband. Some people have that, yes. Where we live right now, only the luckiest people have that. We’re not close enough to a switching station to use DSL or AT&T Uverse.
People who really need internet connection and don’t have the option of connecting by cable are either using weather-sensitive satellite (Hughes, Exede) connections with truly onerous overage fees, or slowish wi-fi mesh if they are geographically/topographically-advantaged and able to get a line-of-sight link, or limp along on mobile hot spots from their cell phones. This might be good enough if one’s work is not bandwidth-intensive or deadline-heavy.
I hear you. Unfortunately, the rest of those items on your list don’t apply to our place here but man o man I sure wish they did.
Good-bye city life, indeed.
Behold, the fkd up institutionalized barriers that speak of corporate lobbying controlling the fate of broadband for all:
Good luck to those living in an area that doesn’t even have a city, home-rule area, or even an extraterritorial jurisdiction to plead with and prompt ISPs to do more to serve communities without good access:
1. We live along side and were surrounded by our neighbors/customers who had some serious ideas about uptime and bandwidth speeds. We got trouble calls at dawn on Sunday mornings, weeknights at midnight, pretty much all the time any time and much of it was PEBKAC. A few years in, we had to explain to everyone that there’s a thing called “office hours” and we enforced them. There were no Starbucks in Austin yet, and public libraries mostly didn’t have public wi-fi yet.
2. Lightning strikes, no matter how well we armored our WAN, were an ongoing and costly issue. There were days/nights where we troubleshot in the rain, using craptops and walkie-talkies (no cell phones yet). We converted part of the network to fiber at a ferocious expense and did see better stability, at least as far as lightning blowing things up. O the hilarity. The slow-pay or no-pay customers/neighbors were likewise a source of endless not-fun. Pro tip: never live next to or surrounded by all your customers; it’s not a guaranteed solid revenue model and it’s super awkward walking around the neighborhood being polite to people who stiff you and then go on expensive vacations.
