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Have you lived in TX? I still believe we have a ways to go, but places that are cheap, will always be cheap for a reason.
Back in the day when I was with AMD we set up two fab sites in Austin and San Antonio.
Closed down pretty much all the rest in SV. Most of AMDs US workforce today is located in Austin. Other SV employers moved up north (Intel, Symantec) or even the Great Lakes region (Seagate). What you see today is a token amount left working in CA.
It is what it is... Cheap = Attractive ...
Can you just answer my questions? They really aren’t that hard. No need to look up charts or find data.
Honey, You got your ass slapped ... enjoy it.
I swear, do some of you guys drink heavily before you post or something? Wong, it's only 11:30, put the bottle down.
Ch-tah. I been working in SV for over 3 decades. Like many of my peers we seen lots of changes and understand high prices have a direct impact on local job formation. Clearly you and your RE cronies have no experience working in SV or even understand dynamics of the local economies.
Keep pumping the BS, at the end that is all you have!
Ch-tah. I been working in SV for over 3 decades. Like many of my peers we seen lots of changes and understand high prices have a direct impact on local job formation. Clearly you and your RE cronies have no experience working in SV or even understand dynamics of the local economies.
Keep pumping the BS, at the end that is all you have!
So you should know best that if SV is a sinking ship, you should move. Plus with 30+ years experience, you should be in high demand.
Why can't you just answer when and where you will move? Or is the real answer, you're full of crap, the BA isn't the next Detroit.
As for your RE comments and pumping - the only RE cronies I have is the agent that we used to purchase our house, whom I do not like at all. I haven't done any pumping - just asked when you are moving to Shangri-la, er, Texas, and for some reason you can't answer it. On a similar note, you continue to "pump" your case that the BA is going to hell and prices are going to collapse. So who's the one trying to manipulate the market here?
Have a read, it doesnt seem to be sinking in with you...
On the Record with Carl Guardino
A: Unequivocally, yes. Not only to the CEOs in the boardroom, but to any family you talk to in their living room. What we hear time after time from CEOs as well as frontline employees is how incredibly difficult it is to come here and stay here. That truly does have an impact on a company’s bottom line when the cost differential is so much higher here than it is in other regions around the state, nation and globe, or the ability to recruit top talent is also impacted.
You mentioned housing. It probably is the top concern we hear about in Silicon Valley from both CEOs and employees in terms of local issues. Does that have an impact? Let me put a finer point on it.
Hewlett-Packard and Dell are the top two computer-makers in the world. Corporate headquarters for HP are located in Palo Alto and Dell is in Round Rock, Texas. Obviously, they both have people and facilities around the globe.
In those two communities where their corporate headquarters are and where a lot of research and development takes place, the median resale price for a home in Palo Alto is about $1.6 million. In Round Rock, Texas, it’s about $180,000 except the home and property are bigger.
We hear from HP all the time that a huge deterrent to the ability to recruit and retain people anywhere near Silicon Valley is the housing issue.
We don’t hear that from Dell, which is also a member company, about their operations in Round Rock. It does continue to plague us and we will continue to sound the alarm.
Hank Nothhaft is the CEO of Tessera, a firm in the field of semiconductor miniaturization. He shows me the vacant office parks and empty lots around his company’s San Jose factory. Silicon Valley, he observes, lost more than a quarter of its computer, microchip, and communications-equipment manufacturing jobs from 2001 to 2008, and Tessera proved no exception. The company has kept some of its assembly lines and industrial operations going here, but it now produces two-thirds of its nanotechnology chips in less expensive North Carolina and in various countries overseas, with China becoming the latest contender for a production facility. Just back from a trip there, Nothhaft says that he has been offered terms he “cannot decently refuse.†Using the Internet and videoconferencing, he can manage Tessera factories around the globe without leaving his San Jose office. “The business environment is becoming awful in California,†Nothhaft complains—just by moving his headquarters to Nevada, he’d save $5 million a year in taxes.
Those were great reads. They left me with 2 burning questions for you:
W-H-E-N A-R-E Y-O-U M-O-V-I-N-G?
W-H-E-R-E T-O?
They left me with 2 burning questions for you
You cant burn a candle at both ends...
... high home prices AND jobs..
You can have one but not both .. so pick one!
Serpentor
@
2011 Mar 8, 1:40pm
median by itself is an incomplete story. You have to know what the deviation is.
Retail jobs at McDonalds, Walmart, etc. pays about the same whether you are in Mountain View or Columbia, MO. These may 30% of the jobs. The real difference between location is what you find in the top 25% of the jobs, which is where areas like Mountain View and San Francisco shines and Columbia are absolute duds.
A median household income metric alone would rarely reflect this, so you have to understand the deviation along with the median. Based on the eye-ball test of the city data. the 75% percentile is around the 150K-200K income level while the 90% percentile is well within the 200K to max. In Columbia, MO the top 75% percentile is around 75K and the top 10% tile is 100K-125K. The deviation adds more to the story. That 50K delta at the median household income became 100K difference at the 75% tile and perhaps 150K delta at the 90% tile.
26% of mountain view residents have household income over 150K, 14% has household income over 200K. That is 8000 households. Housing units in Mountain View with a mortgage is 7,026, less than households over 150K.19.8% of the families have income over 200K
http://www.city-data.com/income/income-Mountain-View-California.html
25% of Columbia resdients have household income over 75K, 7% has income over 125K. about 3K households. 9,778 households have a mortgage.
http://www.city-data.com/income/income-Columbia-Missouri.html
Household income is one of many living expense. A house in mountain view that cost 5X more does not mean living expense is 5x more overall. Insurance, gas, food is pretty much the same. So once you aggregate all the cost, Mountain view my be just 2X-3X more expense, not 5X. Salary and household cost should not have a linear answer.
The MID is the most lucrative in the country (28%-35% benefit) whereas the MID in Missouri is pretty much worthless (0-10% benefit).
Income is one factor to affordability, the other is household wealth which is not even mentioned. I bet that the 75% tile household wealth in Mountain View is a least 5x that of Columbia
Just these obbservations reconcile most of the differences why household income/price should not even be close to the same.
you are comparing apples to oranges. How about comparing Mountain View CA to Lexington MA? Much higher concentration of high income families yet home prices are 200k less (and much much bigger land, less apartment dwellers, and considerably better educational system.
It seems that a lot of people end up coming to the Bay Area and staying for ten years or so. There could be cultural reasons for that--this area is welcoming and interesting for people in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties--but affordability has to factor in, too. If young people who make more money than their parents ever have can't afford a house as good as the one in which they were raised, they might look for other options. Educational systems also matter as people become parents. Kids in California get a much cheaper public education than kids in other parts of the country, and it shows. Most of the tech workers I know are not locals--they received a strong education somewhere else and came here to do interesting work. Increasingly there are opportunities to do interesting tech work in other places, albeit with worse weather. But if you didn't grow up in the California sunshine, maybe you don't have to have it. Particularly if the trade-off includes financial security and good schools.
That said, I've heard about this pattern for years. Is is a sustainable pattern? Are new eager engineers still pouring into California to keep the cycle going? If so, then it does not matter if a lot of 35-year-olds are leaving.
Lexington MA?
There's nothing sexy about Lexington, that's why. They don't have their own "Real" Housewives series, no trashy celebs getting busted on TMZ, no glamor professions for young entitled types or trophy properties on Park Ave for the Foreign Money Millionaires.
That said, I’ve heard about this pattern for years. Is is a sustainable pattern? Are new eager engineers still pouring into California to keep the cycle going? If so, then it does not matter if a lot of 35-year-olds are leaving.
The reality is hiring for California companies takes place in many states. Intel will court several grads in say Ohio or Florida and hire to work in the NorthWest or other locations. So its not do you want to work in California.. its do you want to work for Intel, HP, Oracle ? But that can be anywhere in any state and often is. And many people are all to eager to work for a BlueChip regardless where it is. If your cool and hip, need not apply. They are not interested!
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This article states that "the cost of a home is about 19 months of total pay for an average family, the lowest level in 35 years"
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/03/04/investopedia51111.DTL#ixzz1Fx5C025C
In my neighborhood, 19 months total pay is about $158,000. The typical listing is closer to $1 million.
So, tell me again why the bay area is different. So different to justify prices at a factor of 6 or 8x the national fundamentals....