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America's Most Affordable Cities For Tech Workers: Seattle, Austin, and Pittsburgh (prnewswire.com)
"Seattle tech workers who own their homes can expect to have about $2,000 more in disposable income each month than tech workers in the Bay Area," according to a new study from LinkedIn and Zillow. An anonymous reader writes:
"For technology workers who rent, Seattle, Austin and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania came out on top among the housing markets analyzed, with the Bay Area at #4..." the two companies reported. "Salaries for other industries don't hold up as well in the San Francisco area, though. Even highly-paid finance workers keep only about 32 percent of their incomes after paying for housing and taxes. In Charlotte or Chicago, they can pocket a median of 61 percent."
The Bay Area's high housing prices are apparently offset by the high salaries paid there to tech workers, according to the study. Even so, both home owners and renters pay roughly half the median income for housing on the west coast, "while a rental in the middle of the country costs more like 25 percent of the median income."
The report also identified the best cities for health workers -- Phoenix, Indianapolis, and Boston -- as well as for finance workers, who do best in Charlotte, Chicago and Dallas. The top 15 cities for tech workers also included those same cities except Chicago and Phoenix, while also including known tech hotspots like Denver, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. But surprisingly the top 15 best cities for tech workers also included Detroit, Nashville, St. Paul (Minnesota) and Tampa, Florida.
The Bay Area's high housing prices are apparently offset by the high salaries paid there to tech workers, according to the study. Even so, both home owners and renters pay roughly half the median income for housing on the west coast, "while a rental in the middle of the country costs more like 25 percent of the median income."
The report also identified the best cities for health workers -- Phoenix, Indianapolis, and Boston -- as well as for finance workers, who do best in Charlotte, Chicago and Dallas. The top 15 cities for tech workers also included those same cities except Chicago and Phoenix, while also including known tech hotspots like Denver, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. But surprisingly the top 15 best cities for tech workers also included Detroit, Nashville, St. Paul (Minnesota) and Tampa, Florida.
Silicon Valley is pretty much a wasteland now. A lot of the real innovation is taking place elsewhere in the country. Silicon Valley is full of companies built on advertising, which is a bubble that's bound to collapse. I can't see why anyone would want to move to Silicon Valley when there are far better options available now, including all of the cities listed in the summary and many others.
Article is wrong about Austin. It's very expensive. And there are no jobs for tech workers. And it's dirty. With marauding gangs of looters. Many reports of paranormal activity. High risk of pandemic or terrorist attack. No housing supply.
And no Uber!
No, no. You don't want to move to Austin. Don't even bother checking it out.
Seattle is expensive as hell, the internet is garbage, and the weather is cloudy every day. Your two major companies, Amazon and Microsoft, are constantly looking for ways to outsource you or get you to work extra hours for free.
Fuck Seattle.
about the H1-Bs (and I know I'm being petty, but hey, I'm getting my ass kicked here financially). They're a captive audience for the renters. There's no way they're gonna buy a home while they're here on work visas. So they drive up my rent substantially. Maybe if I made enough to afford a down payment on a home but, well, with my wages depressed like this that ain't happening...
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I've been told it's quite expensive, although it's not San Francisco and Silicon Valley expensive.
Low cost housing, many distinct old ethnic neighborhoods and restaurants, good school districts. Rails-to-trails have created many wonderful biking walking trails. Will feel all the four seasons. Only negatives are the narrow single laned roads. Very pictureque and beautiful, as long as you don't have to go anywhere in a hurry, it is great.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Eight. One to change the bulb, and seven to talk about how much better the light bulbs were at the Armadillo World Headquarters...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Pittsburgh is a great place unless you want to see the horizon. With all those rolling hills the most you can really see in any direction is about a 1/2 mile. After growing up in a place where I could see the horizon I actually felt a bit claustrophobic in Pittsburgh.
And it ranks just behind Seattle for cloudy days, so don;t plan on seeing much in the way of sunlight.
https://www.currentresults.com...
At the opposite end of the spectrum I loved living and working in Salt Lake City for the vistas and the sunshine (other things not so much)
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...but yeah, even with that, $250,000 will still buy you a nice house in the Austin area. Good look finding anything like that anywhere near Silicon Valley...
Just one of the many, many advantages Texas has over California.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
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Why refer to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area as St. Paul (Minnesota)? The LinkedIn data reads it as "Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN", and it makes no sense to refer to the area by the smaller city, St. Paul.
"about $2,000 more in disposable income each month"
That's, like, almost 5 new MacBook Pros every year! If you don't count all the adaptors you'd need.
No, not wire tapping, but two madmen calling the shots.
It may not be Bay Area, but it is hardly an affordable place to live. I read some article that had it as one of the places housing prices were increasing the most. Plus the city has passed transit bills that are making everyone's property taxes skyrocket, which means rents are going up even more.
Seattle may be affordable for Amazon/MSFT employees, but that's only because Seattle is about 5 years behind SF. Housing prices, traffic are skyrocketing and if you have a job where you don't get options (teacher/fire fighter for example)... it's time to leave.
Cleveland has a growing technology sector. It's highly affordable, we have awesome restaurants and breweries and fantastic cultural sights (art museum, PlayhouseSquare, etc.).
News stories I've found indicate what you said is correct:
... CenturyLink (CTL) customers trying to access particular sites from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. will have unbearably slow speeds."
Seattle: Together with abusive companies and bad city management, Seattle is a miserable place.
Houses in Seattle are expensive: Seattle bumps Boston as the most expensive U.S. housing market that's not in California.
Rent is expensive: Seattle rent is 5th most expensive in U.S.
Traffic: Seattle one of the worst U.S. cities for traffic congestion, tied with NYC (March 31, 2015) Quote: "An additional 23 minutes a day spent in traffic may not sound like much, but when it adds up over a year it becomes 89 hours." (Whoever wrote that must be accustomed to Seattle misery. An additional 23 minutes a day spent in traffic sounds HORRIBLE.)
Slow internet: Many areas of Seattle have poor internet connections. See the article, These places have the slowest Internet in the country. (June 25, 2015) Quote: "... Seattle
Microsoft: Microsoft Is Filled With Abusive Managers And Overworked Employees, Says Tell-All Book (May 23, 2012)
Amazon: Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon's sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers (February 23, 2014)
Amazon: Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace (August 15, 2015) Quote: "The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers..."
Amazon: Amazon Under Fire Over Alleged Worker Abuse in Germany (February 19, 2013)
China is loaded with cheap and not that safe work places where people make like $0.50-$1.25 USD per hour
India in some ways others mills of cheap workers chained to there usa jobs.
As you should have noticed by the thread, techies are not adept at sarcasm.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Oh ... by "tech workers" you meant "people who work for big name tech companies".
Every city reaches a population density where the cost of removing old buildings and building new infrastructure is astronomical. It means either new infrastructure is built in the suburbs, thus creating a decentralized city, or the city stagnates and people slowly leave.
Another story about SF running out of space, which happens to many cities too, although it tends to happen after infrastructure is frozen. They have a choice, demolish the old housing districts and build another concrete jungle, or create a second city centre. The second option is possible since SF already supports Mountain View and Menlo Park.
If you're going to list Pittsburgh as a city for tech workers, you might as well list Detroit too. And it's very cheap.
And yes, Quicken Loans has quite a few tech workers there.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Atlanta has much higher salaries than Seattle for what I do; it also has a much higher cost of living as well. And I don't give a fuck about cost of rental.
Who gives a shit what percentage of your income you spend in a rental? More important is how much absolute money you have left after paying for housing (e.g, the amount you spend on food, entertainment, retirement savings, etc). Seems to me that optimizing for housing percentage of salary is totally bogus.
However, more important is quality of life and the metropolitan area you live in is generally less important than exactly where you live in that city and what you like to do with your spare time. For example, if you like the sun, Seattle sunshine is a bit scarce (for my taste anyhow). On the other hand, if you want to live in your parent's basement you probably can't do that in Cali as most houses don't have basements and affordable houses tend to be on the small size (not to mention the difficutlies if your parent's don't actually live there). If you like fishing and barbecue, don't go to Austin (but there are plenty of places near enough to Austin to commute for that, although the traffic is getting a bit prohibitive for that). Don't know much about Pittsburgh (only visited twice). Seems like it might be nice, except in the winter (when my father-in-law got snowed in for a couple days).
guess that a lot of people don't understand all the details.
Getting a job at Microsoft or Amazon is considered, by some people, as good support for getting future jobs.
Suppose you have lived for years in Seattle. Your friends are there. You have spent years learning to make yourself comfortable there. You wouldn't want to move. And, if you decide to move, to where?
There are people who make huge amounts of money who are willing to accept that there are some surroundings that are miserable.
Mostly, however, I think I don't fully understand the sociology of Seattle.
The article is also wrong about Seattle. It's freezing over there and really cold. You wouldn't like the weather. Unlike the bay area, the squirrels wouldn't even come out to bite your nuts. Not to mention the heating bills, they are very expensive compare to the bay area. The housing in Seattle is so expensive that you'll feel empty from all those mountains in the background.
No, you don't want to move to Seattle. And don't google about it either.
De-hipsterize the rest of the country. Plus, when the Cascadia earthquake comes, it will de-hipsterize the rest.
https://www.zillow.com/research/take-home-pay-linkedin-14462/
Using their proprietary data, LinkedIn computed three labor-market metrics for each of the three industries and each metro analyzed:
The hire rate: The number of professionals on LinkedIn who indicated a job change in 2016, relative to the total number of professionals on LinkedIn;
The number of job openings: The number of available LinkedIn jobs, per one thousand LinkedIn members; and
The median wage reported on LinkedIn for workers in a given industry and metro, through January 2017.
Raleigh, NC + Jacksonville, FL not being on the list are both ridiculous. Tech is huge in both places and highly affordable. I'm sure there are others. Makes sense though based on their survey methodology - those of us with gainful stable long-term employment won't show up on this list.
When? 10-20 years ago maybe. Have relatives that live in Kirkland (near Redmond) They say it's NUTS to live IN Seattle.
I live in Charlotte, and a large chunk of people live in South Carolina (Fort Mill, Rock Hill, etc) and drive to Charlotte to work. Do these get factored in to the "market" or is it specifically focused on the Mecklenburg county metropolitan area?
The SC locations would certainly depress the average cost of living if they're factored in. You can get a lot of house for very little money, ~$100/sqft for average acommodations and $150-200 for luxury accomodation. However, there's definitely appears to be a housing bubble starting in Charlotte. Too high a percentage of luxury apartments when compared to other cities, and housing in certain areas is so competitive that the average days on market in my zip code is less than a week, and often houses sell in less than a day with a pre-emptive open-house starting a bidding war. Some of my coworkers took 6-8 months to find a house where they wanted it for school reasons.
Personally, I own a condo in a booming area but will probably move to a house in SC in the near future, within driving distance to Charlotte. HB2 has done quite a bit of damage to commerce in NC, no matter how loud the idiots in Raleigh want to scream that it hasn't. The guys in Asheville have been hit the worst but I see it here as well.
I work in Boston, live in Providence. Best of both worlds - salaries higher, costs lower in home city.
What results did we expect if we're comparing one of ( if not THE ) most expensive place to live in the United States ?
EVERYTHING else will be cheaper by default :|
Personally, we prefer you all stay where you're at. The traffic in Austin is a good example of what happens when everyone starts showing up here to escape the high cost of living.
Are you claiming that the news stories that are linked are trolls?
No, Seattle is not one of the most affordable cities for tech workers.
Maybe Bellingham or Spokane.
Next fake claim you'll make is that Vancouver BC is one of the most affordable cities for tech workers - and it's always cost twice as much for housing in Vancouver BC as in Seattle, where apparently I can rent my spare bedroom for $2200 a month.
I claim Fake News.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So much is being done to attract people to the region that it is making it unbearable for those of us who have always been here. We're giving up lanes on major city streets to make room for bike lanes that are only usable for 5 months out of the year.
The city just removed the chairs from Market Square to make more room for the patrons of the upscale restaurants that surround the place.
The glut of well-to-do out of towners has led to the gentrification of several areas like Homewood, The Hill District and East Liberty which is in turn creating problems out in the suburbs. Basically, people are going in and buying blocks of low value property, renovating them and charging more for rent than the current occupants can afford. Those people move further and further away from the city and when you have an influx of low income people, a small but extremely destructive minority of drug dealers comes with them. We have had numerous heroin busts just a few miles from my house in an area that never saw that kind of activity before.
When people like me complain about it, we're met with the response that this is how things go in other cities. My reply is that if I wanted to live in those cities, I'd move there. I live in Pittsburgh and I like it.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I've worked in Austin, and the traffic wasn't terrible for me. Waze made a huge difference. YMMV.
IMHO, it's worth living in this city solely for the ATX hackerspace and the fantastically well equipped TechShop.
I live in Nashville and I love it here. IT is in strong demand and the cost of living is low. No state income tax on wages is fantastic. I wish our airport was still a hub though. Always having to make connections sucks.
In my experience, Zillow is famously bad with real world property valuations, so why should we care what they think? Several Realtor friends and acquaintences think their numbers are garbage also.
The US still leads in tech innovation by far. The closest competitors are Japan, South Korea, and Germany (in some products, not so much electronics or software), not China and India. A whole lot of countries ride on the coattails of the US, either by copying popular US products or by offering cheap labor and resources for US companies to exploit.
There really aren't any affordable tech cities in the US right now. In Europe, though they're having similar issues, it's nowhere near the scale of change that has happened in the US, but salaries are also quite a bit lower. According to Expatistan, most major cities in mainland Europe are 30-50% cheaper than NY and SF (excluding London and Zurich). Spain supposedly has an affordable housing market and there is a growing tech industry in Barcelona and Madrid. Amsterdam and Paris continue to be among top cities for tech jobs in mainland Europe, though cost of living is going to be marginally better than New York, SF when factoring in the local salary and taxes. Houses around Paris are supposedly still reasonably affordable though and the cost of living in other French cities is lower. Berlin is still cheap and has a lot of startups, but doesn't really offer much in terms of stability and it definitely seems like a young 20 something oriented city. Some people love living there, others hate it. Munich is known as the main engineering and tech city there, but there are fewer startups than Berlin. Higher cost of living, but also higher salaries.
I made a mess of my life and don't have a college degree. OTOH if I'd graduated college I probably wouldn't have noticed how bad things are in America. I'd be making enough money I could have weathered the storms that hit me. OTOH again if I was the sort of person that coulda got through a college degree I probably wouldn't have had those storms (which were mostly caused by bad decisions made by family members I couldn't see myself abandoning. Shit happens).
That's the trouble with there being no safety net...
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