Cafeteria workers at facebook earn 40k per year and are stuck living in people's garages. Anywhere else in the country, and they'd be thoroughly midclass with 40k per year. It mostly comes down to egregiously awful housing policies that make it 5-10 times more expensive to live here. This hurts everyone.
Other cities manage to do it. Look at red cities like Houston, that are growing every bit as fast and still manage to keep housing costs low. And the population density in TX is roughly same as CA, at least overall. Ultimately, it comes down to the ratio of jobs to housing. The penninsula has 4 jobs to every 1 person place to live. You have to build more housing or get rid of jobs, to make two back into balance. and, for christ sake, get rid of those CEQA laws and anything else that gets in the way of housing costs. We need to start working with developers, not against them.
Is Houston really red? Most of its political representation seems firmly in the urban liberal left. That the city sprawls like crazy is more of a red Texas artifact.
The population densities of Texas and California are about the same overall because they both have vast amounts of unpopulated land. If you look at the density of cities, however, California is much more dense than Texas in general.
>That the city sprawls like crazy is more of a red Texas artifact.
It's actually an artifact of Houston's original charter which allowed nearly unlimited growth via annexation and Houston's use of that annexation power to reclaim its tax and voter base each time they moved outward from the city center. Houston grew from 9 square miles in 1900 to ~600 square miles today. See http://www.chron.com/local/history/major-stories-events/arti... for more details.
Blue dots surrounded by red also happens in California (and indeed, in any state with cities). It’s just that the blue dots are much more dense in California.
I don’t think there is such a thing as a red big city.
Cheaper housing sounds good, but I wonder if it may just lead to lower salaries. Companies are maximizing shareholder returns by keeping expenses as low as possible. Shareholders, essentially, get paid before cafeteria workers, or even tech workers.
salaries aren't paid on a "cost plus" model of "housing" + "schooling" + "discretionary for workers", it is paid based on the negotiating power of the employee. The way salaries might be impacted is through increasing the pool of people willing to work in the SFBA.
Cafeteria workers at facebook earn 40k per year and are stuck living in people's garages. Anywhere else in the country, and they'd be thoroughly midclass with 40k per year. It mostly comes down to egregiously awful housing policies that make it 5-10 times more expensive to live here. This hurts everyone.
Other cities manage to do it. Look at red cities like Houston, that are growing every bit as fast and still manage to keep housing costs low. And the population density in TX is roughly same as CA, at least overall. Ultimately, it comes down to the ratio of jobs to housing. The penninsula has 4 jobs to every 1 person place to live. You have to build more housing or get rid of jobs, to make two back into balance. and, for christ sake, get rid of those CEQA laws and anything else that gets in the way of housing costs. We need to start working with developers, not against them.