You get by on a low salary by living with multiple people in the same apartment. Or you live far away and commute. Or both.

Not really a tenable long-term situation for a senior employee with plans to start a family. Family homes of decent size and area are literally millions of dollars.

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mort96 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I guess I don't understand why programmers somehow deserve a better life than other people. Janitors deserve to start families too, don't they?

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throw-the-towel 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Usually this kind of argument leads to punishing the programmers, not lifting up the janitors.

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mort96 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That's kind of two sides of the same coin, isn't it? The cost of living is so high in part because so many have ridiculously high salaries, isn't it?

	▲	swiftcoder 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The cost of living is so high in part because so many have ridiculously high salaries Bigger problem in the SF area is that a bunch of folks who owned property before the gold rush have ended up real-estate-rich, and formed a voting block that actively prevents the construction of new housing (on the basis that it might devalue their accidental real estate investment)

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0x3f 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not about deserving, programmers just have enough market power to be able to choose to go elsewhere. Janitors and other more fungible employees do not.

Besides, I did already say that everyone else was underpaid relative to costs. But that's not unique to the Bay Area. Cost of housing relative to income is terrible in almost all of the major European cities too.

Once cities become wealthy enough to develop a home owning class, they seem to cease being able to provision adequate housing supply in general.