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The Best and Worst Cities To Live in For Tech Workers, Based on Rent and Commute (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Most cities with a cluster of tech companies can offer those workers either a short commute or low rents -- but not both, according to a study by property consultancy Savills. Berlin is the exception to that rule. Savills found that the German capital offers tech workers some of the lowest rents and among the shortest commutes of 22 cities it surveyed. Commuting is a hugely important factor for worker satisfaction. One study, by the UK's Office of National Statistics, found that each additional minute of commuting increased workers' anxiety and reduced their satisfaction with life. Based on how long it takes to get to work.
The five best cities are: Austin (16 mins), Melbourne, Stockholm, Berlin, and Tokyo (24 mins).
Five worst cities: Bengaluru (47 mins), Hong Kong, Seattle, Seoul, and Toronto (40 mins).
Based on how much tech workers pay in rent (per week).
Best cities: Seoul ($153), Santiago, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Cape Town ($192).
Five worst cities: San Francisco (with $775.45), New York, Boston, London, and Singapore ($488.16).
The five best cities are: Austin (16 mins), Melbourne, Stockholm, Berlin, and Tokyo (24 mins).
Five worst cities: Bengaluru (47 mins), Hong Kong, Seattle, Seoul, and Toronto (40 mins).
Based on how much tech workers pay in rent (per week).
Best cities: Seoul ($153), Santiago, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Cape Town ($192).
Five worst cities: San Francisco (with $775.45), New York, Boston, London, and Singapore ($488.16).
Who lives in Austin and has a 16 minute commute?
That's bullshit. My parking space goes for $400/month. I doubt you could rent a closet for $400.00
I could easily rent at $775.45 in San Francisco.
In a cardboard box under an overpass that is.
It's all great that it takes 24 minutes, but in general, it's quite hard to find a place to rent long term. So if you're a foreign worker, good luck competing with the locals who have been in queues to get a 1st hand contract rental for many years already...
So well, if you can't move there, you're not part of the statistics of course!
I'm in a Canadian city comparable to Toronto on the list. I'm not understanding how they calculate rent at $334 (rounded). Is that per square foot of the shop?? Or the average rent the tech workers pay? If the latter, then the report needs a healthy grain of doubt. I have not heard of a $334/month rent in Canada for 20+ years. I think the going rate for rent in cities like Toronto are near $1000/month. The article doesn't really clarify how they got the rent numbers. Anyone from Toronto want to give an opinion on the rent figures? But, a 40 minute commute time seems plausible. It's about what it takes for me here (during rush hour) and I live approx 60km from the office (by choice).
I well remember, many years ago, seeing a job advertisement in the British "Daily Telegraph". It was for a job at some college in Melbourne, and it ended along these lines:
"Accomodation provided at xyz - 85 miles from Melbourne (one hour's drive)".
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I live in the mid-west, and until a recent job change, had a shorter commute than everything in that list - plus a 3 bed house for less than the vast majority of that list. My income is on par with national averages for my job title, yet I have a vastly below average cost of living.
For the life of me, I can't fathom why anyone would want to live in a big city. Every perk I hear touted, I can beat. It's quiet, I have a yard, and I have more spending money that the saps choking on smog.
RENT ?!! Like some SERF?!!1!
also, TIL my 45-minute commute is in the "worst" range, with living out in the hinterlands of flyover country.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It's strange to me that they mention Cape Town, but not Johannesburg, where arguably the majority of South Africa's (if not the continent's) tech work is done.
The article also is a bit quiet on how they do the exchange rate and cost-of-living conversions between the different countries.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
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I pay $1466 for a studio apartment and make $50K+ per year in IT support in Palo Alto. If I had a car, it would take me 20 minutes in the morning and 45 to 90 minutes in the afternoon. By taking the express bus (one hour each way) for an extra $70 per month, I get read The Wall Street Journal in the morning and an ebook in the afternoon. Why drive when others can drive for you?
Actually clicked through to the article, only to skip reading just about any of it.
They're never going to pay you 4x, it's probably not even worth your time to talk to them. If you consider a move like that, you are banking on equity you have built up being applied to your future home so that the cost is lower: basically you are going to front the cost of moving and absorb the risk that the higher wages make it profitable before the inevitable downsizing and layoffs begin.
It really doesn't pay to move there for most people, which is why most of those companies, even the hold-outs have been opening satellite offices in other places.
Humble homes available well under $100k CDN, some for less than $50k CDN.. ...all with gigabit fiber to the home, 5 minutes no traffic to an airport with direct flights to Toronto. (2h 30m).
Enjoy the cities. I'm living the good life. You can too, if you can work remotely in Canada!
..don't panic
Vancouver is massive for Tech in Canada... and I turned down $50,000 more money because I'd have to get a tiny apartment to be within an HOUR of where I'd work, for comparable money to a house just about anywhere else except Toronto. That Vancouver wasn't on this list is very very weird.
My cousin lives there, 10 years ago she paid $1000 a month for an apartment the size of my livingroom. I'd guess that may have doubled by now. Granted, she can walk to the beach. I live in small college town Illinois and ride a longboard to work. Takes 6 minutes to go the mile. I gots no beach.. :(
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Just crunched the numbers for my hometown (Tulsa, OK). Both the average rents ($175/month) and the average commute (21.3 minutes) would be in their top 5.
Yeah, we're not exactly a famous tech hub. But we do have a pretty decent concentration of telecommunications and flight simulation work here. Enough to keep me employed and happy with my 15-30 minute commute and my house that would cost $3.5 Million in San Fran.
The full Savills report (http://pdf.euro.savills.co.uk/global-research/tech-cities-2017.pdf) doesn't really mention how they selected the "top 22 cities", only how the cities they selected rank comparatively and the metrics they used to differentiate them. A cynic might be inclined to think that a "property consultancy" is mostly interested in pitching cities they have active property in.
Since one of the advantages of "tech" (let's just call them software startups) is the possibility of remote working, maybe the answer to the "top 22 cities" to do tech in is - the one you live and work in already?
And you're in Illinois.
If I'm guessing right, when the wind is wrong, you also get to smell Decatur for days at a time.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
>$4225/mo × 12mo/y ÷ 52w/y = $975/week.
Good gravy! Think of it this way - if you moved out of the tech bubble area into a normal place, you would effectively get a raise of $3,000/month ($36,000 / year) on housing savings alone. And have a bigger, better house. And no traffic. And cheaper cost of living on everything else you spend money on.
Conservatively, you're easily paying (losing) +45,000 / year just to say you live someplace cool. Hope it's worth it to you.
It seems like any kind of college town you can get some food somewhere late.
When I've visited NYC, it didn't seem like many things were open especially late to me. Not even close to Vegas for example...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Isn't this kind of meaningless?
"The pattern of a trade-off between rent and length of commute is evident when you look at the cities with the cheapest rent and shortest commutes. Workers in Austin only have an average 16-minute commute to work, but pay among the highest rents at $476 a week. Workers in Seoul, meanwhile, pay the lowest rent, $153 a week, but have to endure a 40-minute commute, the fourth longest on the list."
In virtually any city, each individual makes that trade-off for themselves. Live farther out, have a longer commute but cheaper rent. Live close in, have a short commute but higher rent.
OT: Austin used to be a lovely city, before it was "discovered". Now it's a satellite of California, both in terms of size (and horrible traffic), and in terms of progressive politics. Californian refugees are repeating the same mistakes that drove them out of CA - pushing things like "light rail", "rent control" and all the rest. Whipping up SJW outrage, for example, the recent survey claiming that 15% of UT undergraduates are raped (the trick: "verbal pressure" counts as rape). A sad fate for a once-nice Texas city.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I am not sure it makes sense to talk about rent in Seoul, Korea. Many people are living on the jeonse system where you give a massive security deposit that the landlord will invest (and give you back when you leave) in exchange for the rent to be very low or even free.
So speaking of "rent" might be very biased. Any Korean around to give feed back on these numbers?
The story missed a big one, visa maggots.
Look, it's only our suburbs where people drive 2-3 hours some days. If you actually LIVE in Seattle near where you work, your bike commute is maybe 15 minutes and you can walk that in 30 minutes. I do it all the time. If it's raining I hop on a bus and it's 30 minutes.
Only suckers drive in Seattle.
And as for Rent, only suckers pay rent in Seattle. You can buy a 2 bedroom no garage townhouse in Fremont (in Seattle) for like $250k. Your mortgage will be half what rent would be. I pay way less for my mortgage than my friends who rent.
You.
Are.
Doing.
It.
Wrong.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
What about salary comparison? Places with higher rent tend to involve higher salary (though not necessarily proportionally so). Without an indication of salary, the rental prices provide little useful data.
You must not have to leave your fantastic location very often. Trying to get anywhere ELSE in the region from Manhattan Beach is a serious bitch. Almost as bad as Santa Monica.
That is why I tell the recruiters for companies in those area that they can't afford me. I want at a minimum the same standard of living I have now and things are negotiable but they won't offer enough to even come close. In silicon valley my house would be a multi million dollar property (will be paid off in 9 years), and my recreational property (owned outright) would probably be as well. Add in that I am able to save 30% of my income, am in a really good school district, and what ever premium you would have to pay me to deal with the CA crazy, drought, mud slides, forest fires, earthquakes, etc. and and you would be looking at several multiples of what I make instead of a 10%-20% increase over my current pay.
Time to offend someone
...can you get Chinese food at 3am in the morning? Because seems to be the stock reason why people claim they love living in NYC.
Every weekend you can go to world class museums, operas, nightclubs, and virtually every crazy cultural niche you can imagine. The entire planet lives in NYC.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
It is sad that the cost of rent and not the cost of a house / mortgage is being used as a benchmark when talking about IT, which is usually considered a higher paying profession. The concept that higher paying professions aren't assumed by default as leading you to property / home ownership is worrying. Yes, I get that "IT" spans a wide range from low level call center work to senior level architects, but nonetheless, it is a sad statement on the state of our world.
+1 its why I never look at anything near SF and would never consider it
Just to maintain the same cost of living they would have to pay me 1.6x my current salary, and thats to maintain. Let alone I would still be facing an increase in housing costs since I bought my house at the bottom of the bubble and its value has increased 1.5x since then. All that for a gain of ................... nothing. Living in colorado we have all the exact amenities that SF can provide and more, except for a bay, all while costing much less.
Ive never understood the mindset of SF/NYC's 'awesomeness'. Ive been to both, multiple times. Sure there may be lots of things to do and places to eat, but in a diverse large city such as denver, or austin, or the ilk of those, you can find all the exact same things to do, types of food and restaurants to eat at, etc. You just may have 10-20 choices instead of 100
Most tech workers are young so they can live "downtown" near work so they have access to events, restaurants and the night life.
47 minutes on average. That very likely means some people are commuting 10 minutes, and others are commuting 90 minutes or more. You're one of those outliers that pulls the average up. If there are a lot of you, then the average is pulled up a lot.
I work with people who live 4 hours drive to the office. They try not to commute when possible, other times they end up taking a hotel or sleeping in their car. But it's not necessarily the house prices here that are keeping them so far away from work.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Seoul: $143 week rent + 40 minutes commute??
Obviously that's living somewhere out in Suwon in a one-room closet. Makes sense.
How do you afford the admission after paying the crazy rent?
**Life is too short to be serious**
I grew up in Orange. I lived in Long Beach for 15 years and consulted with clients everywhere from northern Orange county, out to Sun Valley at one extreme, the San Fernando Valley, Ventura. Downtown Los Angeles, Vernon. There are very few cities in southern California that I have not been to, multiple times. Hollywood, the ultimate cluster fuck.
I lived in Long Beach exactly because I had to know how to get around. From that city alone you have the 405, 605, 22, 710 and 91 freeways. You can skirt across the port and hit the 110. The 710 is by far one of the best north south freeways in the region. East west sucks no matter what, up until you hit the 210 but that's just because the 210 goes where nobody wants to go. The 10? Blows. 60? Blows. Your precious 105? Hahahaha, blows. Where are you going to take that freeway? Nickerson Gardens? Downey?
That entire metropolitan area is a shit show. There is no "knowing how to get around it" that alleviates the fact that its a parking lot for most of the day and night. Unless you are on the road before 5am, lots of luck driving for more than 20 minutes without dealing with some sort of slowing.
My best commute was from Costa Mesa to Irvine, and that still took about 25 minutes to go less than 10 miles most times of the day.
55% of all workers have a commute that takes longer than one hour according to this article: http://toyokeizai.net/articles...
Direct link to info graphic: http://tk.ismcdn.jp/mwimgs/4/0... (maybe you can sort of read it without speaking Japanese)
Based on personal experience and the fact that tech workers don't get paid all that much, this is unlikely to be much different for tech workers. 24 minutes is _maybe_ possible for people who work at Rakuten, which recently moved to the Kanagawa-prefecture border of Tokyo.
(Note: I just recently moved far away from Tokyo to Shimane because of the long commute times.)
How do you afford the admission after paying the crazy rent?
The variety of free or inexpensive events in NYC is overwhelming: symphonies every week in central park in the summer, $20 rush tickets to the Met opera, the Met museum is free, many other major museums have a free day every week, dozens of free concerts literally every day, free public pools, free gallery tours, free yoga and a variety of exercise classes... it goes on and on, a quick look meetup.com can confirm it. If you want plush treatment, you pay, but being broke is no excuse for not doing stuff here. Besides, what good is money if you're not enjoying it.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
I commute to Stockholm daily (ranked 3rd in journey times). My commute takes a bit over an hour each way (75 minutes or there abouts).
If you can afford a downtown apartment, and were on the apartment waiting lists before your Swedish grandparents were born, then your commute could be more like how the survey considers it. Otherwise if your not so lucky (or like me you have moved here from overseas) then an hours commute is the norm.
Be a reasonably successful professional in a high paying field. This is slashdot... its safe too assume most people here aren't slinging chalupas at Taco Bell for a living.