Of princes and paupers

A young woman we know graduated last June, and is excited about the job that she has been offered in San Francisco.  General Malaise that I am, I had to make sure I would not blurt anything bad.  For once, thankfully, I kept my mouth shut.

I did comment to M that this woman will be able to barely rent a closet in somebody's home with the income that she will get.  But then youthful mistakes are what most of our lives are about ;)  She will soon find out!

Housing is so expensive that more people are leaving than those are going there:

The cost of living is among the highest in the world. One founder reckons young startups pay at least four times more to operate in the Bay Area than in most other American cities. New technologies, from quantum computing to synthetic biology, offer lower margins than internet services, making it more important for startups in these emerging fields to husband their cash. All this is before taking into account the nastier features of Bay Area life: clogged traffic, discarded syringes and shocking inequality.

Housing being expensive there is not a new thing.  The growth curve has only become steeper. 

Two decades ago, I was considering a job opportunity at San Jose State University.  When talking with the department chairman, I asked him whether the university offered any subsidy scheme for faculty to own homes there.  After all, faculty don't get paid by the truckload.  He paused.  And responded that housing costs had become a major disincentive, and that attracting faculty was getting to be difficult.  The old timers lucked out, he said.

That was twenty years ago.

Now, think about students who want to go to any of the universities there.  Tough luck finding something affordable!  It has gotten so bad that ...

Amid a local housing crisis and facing a shortage of on-campus beds as the fall quarter looms, UC Santa Cruz sent an email this week to faculty and staff asking them to open their homes to students.
“The need is real and it is urgent, so I am reaching out to the faculty and staff community for help,” the executive director of housing services, Dave Keller, wrote. “Offering a room in your home to a student who has not been able to find housing for the school year would be a tremendous support to their success at UCSC.”

Re-read that excerpt in order to get a feel for how bad the situation is.

And, of course, these are also the no-growth or slow-growth communities where the old-timers who lucked out back in the day are making sure that no new high density residential areas will be built.

Yes, all in "liberal" California!

As George Carlin caustically remarked, these liberals don't really care about others as much as making sure that their awesome lifestyles will not be affected.  The rest can eat cakes!