Someone I know in Palo Alto is renting their 2 bed-3bath for $7000 a month... It took a couple of days at most to find a renter. Another is renting a much larger house for $20,000. Can you imagine?
Mercy. I thought kleinbl00 and goobster talking about prices in this week's Pubski was just a bunch of jawing. This is just freaking stupid. I half bet, if you could afford to live in Palo Alto, you could save up for a year or so, expatriate to a third world country, and live like a king for the rest of your life.
Heh. I basically did that. Skipped out of Silicon Valley in the mid-1990's, when my one bedroom apartment was $2200/mo rent, and I was making $80k/year at Sun Microsystems on the JavaSoft team. Went to Budapest, Hungary, where most people were making about $500/mo. At my peak there, I was bringing in about $5k/mo, and ... well ... I was an American ex-pat asshole for a while there, to be honest. For example, I took my entire development team (10 guys) to the strip bar one night, and paid for everything, for HOURS, with just the cash I had in my pocket. I spent more that one night than any of them would make in a year. And I just carried that amount of cash around in my wallet. Eventually I got some perspective and stopped being That Rich Asshole. That was a helluva awakening. But nowadays I know I live in an expensive city that is following the same trend as SF in the 1990's. Hell, in about 10 minutes I'm going to get a call for a full time job, offering me a writing gig for about $75k/yr, and I'm debating whether to take it or not. It's pretty low. And then I think, in what fucking world does THAT make any goddamn sense?!??!? That's a HUGE sum of money!! The weird cognitive dissonance is familiar from SF in the 90's. But... well... here I am again. (Fortunately I own my home now, so I'm not paying $2k/mo for rent.) live in Palo Alto, you could save up for a year or so, expatriate to a third world country, and live like a king for the rest of your life.