'We're Running Out of Homes For Sale,' Lake Tahoe Brokers Say As Tech Workers Flee Bay Area (cnbc.com) 198
schwit1 shares a report from CNBC: A new wave of urban flight is reshaping real estate markets from New York to Chicago and Los Angeles to San Francisco. As part of this shift, Lake Tahoe is seeing unprecedented bidding wars, buying activity and price increases. Brokers say the inventory of homes for sale has shrunk to about one-fifth to one-tenth of the usual levels. "People are writing all-cash offers for houses, sight unseen," said Sabrina Belleci, a Lake Tahoe broker with Re/Max. "They just want to get out of the city." Historically, properties in the Tahoe area took three to four months to sell, Overall said. Now, it's more like four days.
Lake Tahoe has long been a bucolic escape for Californians looking for a getaway and, on the Nevada side, lower taxes. But the latest buying surge is larger than any the market has seen, brokers say. They say tech workers and investors in the Bay Area, as well as media types from Los Angeles, are coming to the Tahoe area in search of larger homes with home offices, more land for the kids to play, and access to outdoor activities such as swimming and bike riding. The flight from the city got another push this week after Google announced it's keeping workers at home until July 2021. Private schools in the Bay Area also recently announced they will likely shift to all online classes in the fall, which gave families another reason to remain outside of San Francisco.
Lake Tahoe has long been a bucolic escape for Californians looking for a getaway and, on the Nevada side, lower taxes. But the latest buying surge is larger than any the market has seen, brokers say. They say tech workers and investors in the Bay Area, as well as media types from Los Angeles, are coming to the Tahoe area in search of larger homes with home offices, more land for the kids to play, and access to outdoor activities such as swimming and bike riding. The flight from the city got another push this week after Google announced it's keeping workers at home until July 2021. Private schools in the Bay Area also recently announced they will likely shift to all online classes in the fall, which gave families another reason to remain outside of San Francisco.
Tahoe (Score:2)
Wow, all cash offers for a house is pretty baller. I don't think the average tech-monkey could swing that.
Google is doing stay at home for another year. What happens when that year is up? Are these new Tahoe residents going to move back?
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A couple of things: Wow, all cash offers for a house is pretty baller. I don't think the average tech-monkey could swing that.
If they were able to get into those markets a while back they may just have enough equity to swing it, but I agree it's not likely the average Google employee is making a 500K and up all cash offer. Tahoe right now is what Palo Alto was in the days of "just list and let the bidding start."
Google is doing stay at home for another year. What happens when that year is up? Are these new Tahoe residents going to move back?
I would guess there will still be a lot of flexibility. Tahoe to the city is a about a 4 hour drive, flights around an hour. LA is 8hours but flights are also about 1.5 hours. You could workout a schedule so that you make
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That's because probably the person offering all cash is not a tech-monkey; that person is a real estate investor who already has rentals and is buying houses like Monopoly houses to turn the property around to rent. Seen it and heard about it from real estate people elsewhere in CA. This is probably the underlying reason housing prices in CA is through the roof and so hard to get in general.
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"Wow, all cash offers for a house is pretty baller. I don't think the average tech-monkey could swing that."
Where I'm at (suburban NYC pretty far out,) we're not seeing tech monkeys, or if they are tech monkeys they're full stack DevOps SRE tech bros getting paid $300 or $400K by investment banks or FAANGS. An all-cash offer is no problem if you're cashing in a $2M apartment for a $1M house, or even a $800K one for a $400K house. I guess if things change for these people they can always move back to the cit
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I guess I'm imagining 3,000+ sq. ft. houses with some kind of Tahoe/Mountain view and a decent amount of land around it, the kind of thing that somebody way up in into six figures would be buying, not just highly paid tech bros.
The latter might be getting in on this too, but they're probably in an area that's just like any other suburban location and not really so Tahoe.
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People aren't moving out of the cities because Google let them work from home.
Yeah, they pretty much are. Salaries haven't caught up (or rather down) yet, so they are still getting paid Bay Area salaries without any need to actually live in the Bay Area, and are learning there are just as good or equivalent lifestyles and activities outside the Bay in areas that are much more affordable. Why pay $1.5 mill for a 1200 ft run down shack, or pay $2500-3000 a month to rent an 800sq ft apartment if you don't have to? Even if Google eventually drops salaries for people working remotely th
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Don't get my hopes up, man.
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Im under the impression they are moving out of the bay area because their liberal policies have created a health epidemic long before the current pandemic. You cant even sit at an outdoor table at a cafe and have a meal without smelling human feces and watching people lying on the street injecting themselves with heroin. The problem is these people have no clue just how they created this shit hole to begin with. So when they transplant, they take their ideals with them and expect the new place to adopt the
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The problem is these people have no clue just how they created this shit hole to begin with.
By not closing borders to the rest of the country*, which literally ships their homeless people to us to deal with because they are heartless fucks who don't care about anyone but themselves.
The homeless congregate in California because 1) We don't ship them off somewhere else and 2) We have the best weather in the country, which translates to minimum negative health impact from living outside.
But go ahead, pat yourself on the back. That will surely help with the homelessness crisis in America.
* Yes, obviou
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SF is far from the best weather in the country. I was stationed in Alameda in 1990-1991, and again from 1993-1995. It was constantly overcast, grey, and gloomy. When Oakland wasnt consumed by fires, it was a shit hole. When 90% of the businesses have bars on the windows, you're in the ghetto.
Berkeley is your problem with homeless. In 1992 they would sit right by ATMs with some made-up sob story right out of the movie Falling Down, blatantly asking for $20 and sitting on a blanket of broken they dug out of t
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By not closing borders to the rest of the country*, which literally ships their homeless people to us to deal with because they are heartless fucks who don't care about anyone but themselves.
The homeless congregate in California because 1) We don't ship them off somewhere else and 2) We have the best weather in the country, which translates to minimum negative health impact from living outside.
Ridiculous. You can't possibly believe that when people in other states become homeless, they migrate to California to be homeless there because of the weather. California has the highest rate of homelessness in the nation by far. [wikipedia.org] And it isn't because homeless people from other states are moving there.
Putting your homeless on a bus to California so that you don't have to care for them should be illegal, but alas, you can still be a rat bastard in this country with no repercussions.
LOL, San Francisco has a program [sfgov.org] to bus the homeless somewhere else. So does LA. [nbclosangeles.com]
But go ahead and live in some fantasy land that homelessness in California is caused by other states putting their homeless
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LOL, San Francisco has a program [sfgov.org] to bus the homeless somewhere else. So does LA. [nbclosangeles.com]
But go ahead and live in some fantasy land that homelessness in California is caused by other states putting their homeless on a bus to California. It'll keep you from addressing the real causes of homelessness in your state.
Wow, a bus ticket back to your home and support network ("The Homeward Bound program is designed to help reunite people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco with family and friends willing and able to offer ongoing support to end the cycle of homelessness.") is totally the same as busing out patients from mental hospitals [sacbee.com]:
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Moving away isn't going to solve those problems. Seattle, the origin of the term 'skid road' (Yesler Way, where they actually skidded logs on their way to the sawmill) began attracting bums during the Klondike Gold Rush. When people adverse to working figured they could mooch off the new wealth flowing through the city.
Lake Tahoe seems to be a pretty comfy place and it's only a bus ride from downtown S.F. When the money moves there, the grubby hands extended at each off-ramp will follow.
because their liberal policies
Don't you think tho
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I think people move out of state because it got astronomically expensive and the state taxes the piss out of people that report their income honestly and got tired of people on paid assistance get free healthcare, better than what they can buy, and then watch them earn unreported cash that would have made them ineligible for those very benefits. Every time they turn around a new politician wants to dig deeper into their pockets. But then they come to the midwest and insist on things that are expensive, as i
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dont get me started on government spending, I will wear your ear out. Why they have to be THAT brand of bike rake made for the bus, instead of just welding bike racks to the frame, is itself an over-expenditure. I'm sure someone's brother-in-law runs the company that does these modifications. I dont know how many total city buses we have, but I know that these racks should cost in the few hundred dollar price point not tens of thousands. But the bigger point is nobody fucking rides these monstrosities.. Put
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Im under the impression....You cant even sit at an outdoor table at a cafe and have a meal without smelling human feces and watching people lying on the street injecting themselves with heroin.
No that impression is wrong and has always been wrong. There are some bad areas of SF but the city has been cleaning them up over the last five years.
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It seems like a big gamble that they wont go back to office work in a year or 2. I mean im hoping that work from home stays commonplace but I'm not sure I would place this sizable of a bet on it. Then again if I had kids my back yard would be looking mighty insufficient right now.
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Lake Tahoe isnâ(TM)t much better when it comes to home prices, itâ(TM)s just a fancier house.
Look into buying houses lately? Fancier houses go a long way. My wife and I are in a similar situation. I work about 45 minutes from where I live (literally on the opposite end of a major city) and while we could move into a house closer to my work, it would cost more, be smaller, and be about as basic a house as you can get. Whereas now, we live in a house we can afford, is a decent size for our family, has nice upgrades and, when our waterheater died July 4 we actually had enough money saved to get it
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Nope all remote workers, with loans pre-arranged based upon existing properties, so cash offers. The problem is they are making unrealistic investments, remote working will drop, as productivity drops and it will and all of a sudden they will all be trying to sell their properties at the same time and move back to the city to get a job. Employment opportunities are limited for the family as is schooling and looking for a new remote working job, after you lose your existing one, yeah they got you.
Out in the
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"The average Lake Tahoe house price was $653K last month, up 4.9% since last year."
If you sell your house in the Bay Area, you can buy that and have some cash left over.
Well, OK then. . . . (Score:2)
.. . . mind you, last time I visited the Lake Tahoe area, a Commodore 64 and a 300-baud modem was considered cutting-edge tech, but how are the comm amenities out there ? Because a sweet lakeside home with a view is worthless to a techie without sufficient bandwidt isn't going to do the job for long. . .
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Satellite internet seems to be an option where cable and DSL isn't.
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It will be when Starlink comes online. Until then, you're stuck with GEO options where the latency is absolute murder. It makes any kind of interactive traffic unreliable. It's fine for downloading, and marginally acceptable for streaming, but it's going to make you the asshole in any video meeting, VOIP, etc.
Logical (Score:2)
As you like it (Score:5, Funny)
"California is too expensive, what with the taxes and all. Wfh is the excuse we need to move to Nevada!"
[Two months later]
"It's awesome here! But I think we need to vote for a bullet vacuum train to get us to Las Vegas and back to California for visits, and Tahoe needs a subway, monorail, Monorail, MONORAIL!"
Suckers (Score:3)
People who work in offices are suckers.
We had worse pandemics before (Score:2)
In 1918 things were far worse, and yet people came back to cities when it was all over .. even without a vaccine.
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If more jobs permit telecommuting, then less people will move back to cities.
But sure, many people will move back to cities when the current crisis is over, assuming it's not immediately followed by another pandemic — which is not entirely unlikely.
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When the covid death rates are hovering around zero (naturally, or thanks to a treatment/vaccine), it won't take long for everything to open back up again. Especially with telecommuting, people may still want to do city activities. Also, as we saw in the 1918 pandemic (and others) I think covid will bounce around in the rural areas for longer -- in 1918 the pandemic started in the cities and went rural where it did even more damage. I think rural areas and suburbs are where people are more likely to refuse
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The culture is hugely different now then it was then.
- The response to the pandemic in 1918 was far more meager than what countries are doing today. You didn't have whole countries shut down endlessly.
- It sounds morbid, but human life is valued differently now then it was then. Then most families had many children and overall mortality was higher then it is today. Death in general was more "routine" and not as devastating.
- The world was also in the middle of the Great War, which received a lot more attent
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Will it work long term? (Score:2)
It's already well-documented that if you want less than a 2-hour one way commute to work in the Bay Area, you're paying millions for a house or many thousands a month on rent. I live in suburban NY (about 60 miles from NYC) and we're seeing an increase in interest from city dwellers as well. I live at a point where i -could- do a train commute to the city but I'd be looking at a 3-hour round trip or a rage-inducing expensive-parking drive -- but it's not ideal, so I work locally. Houses within reasonable co
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Every recruiter I've talked to who has city jobs to offer me has told me that they're going back at least most of the time as soon as this is over. So, how realistic is it for anyone who doesn't work for Google and friends to sell their house and move to the Catskills or something?
No one knows. The big tech companies are hoping they can make it work, because then they can pay their workers less. Smaller companies are just copying the big ones.
Offshoring has tried and failed for 20 years now (Score:3)
The other thing to think about is this -- let's say remote work does catch on, but then bosses have a brilliant flash of an idea and say "Hey, everyone's remote, why not make them really remote and send the work to India? There should be no difference, right?"
...only in theory. If offshoring worked, there would be few jobs in the bay area. Tech companies are not hiring Americans out of principle. They're hiring them because they have to. The worker shortage is global. Anyone you want to hire in India is already hired and pretty expensive. So say you can hire 6 Indians for the price of 3 Americans, on ave, 4-5 will quit in the first year....so you're constantly retraining them.
If they're any good, they will just go to work for Google, MS, etc. The go
Not Possible in Capitalism. Raise Prices. (Score:2)
The beauty of Capitalism is that you never can run out of non-consumed items for sale. You just have to raise the prices.
Raise them high enough and the people that bought last year will turn around and sell them. Or the people trying to move there will say "Crap, that's too much, let's look somewhere else."
Either way, you will NOT run out of places to sell.
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Wati for winter (Score:2)
It will be interesting to see how many people stay through one of our Tahoe winters, it's long and with any luck there will be lots of snow.
I enjoy the winter a lot but by April/May I'm pretty much done for the year. We still have patches of snow in the high mountains.
But coming from the mild SF weather to the mountain weather is a pretty big shock to some.
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Lots of places (Score:3)
Sure, lots of people just say "move away from high prices". High prices go hand in hand with high wages. I moved to the Seattle area from the midwest, wouldn't go back. Aside from choices of things to do - there's pay. If you save 20% of your income no matter where you live, you've go a much larger bank after working years if your making $200K vs $80K.. that's when there's a real payoff, the end game.
Most people think waaay too big ... (Score:3)
... when it comes to housing.
Point in case: I've by now fully adopted a minimalist lifestyle with all my belongings easily fitting in a 36 square meter single room apartment. I got my kitchen lane in one corner, to large windows out back with quite a bit of green, my 4.5 sqm bathroom and a 2sqm 'hallway'. A neat wide bed for comfy single sleeping or awesome sex with a cute one, a custom-built trolley with my Xboxes and a 27" screen, a small table, a couch table, a couch, my custom built-to-fit bookshelves and stacked storage from muji. .... And I still have to much shit.
If I had the silicon valley money developers get there I would get myself a micro-home built from some container or something. On a large piece of land with solar and a large garden.
I fundamentally don't get these large 6-room cardboard boxes filled with stuff you guys usually live in.
My 2 cents.
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You don't need a huge house with kids either. However, one day your parents, or your spouse's parents, will come over with a 1 meter tall stuffed animal for your kids. Your kids will immediately fall in love with it, and you will have to move out of your micro-home because of it takes up the entire sitting area.
I've tried the minimalist lifestyle. They key is to have your extended family buy into the lifestyle as well. Otherwise they will fill your home with junk for you.
This might not last... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, speaking as someone originally from NYC - born and raised - who moved to upstate Schoharie County 10 years ago (for the space and nature, but definitely not for the neighbors), a couple of points.
1) Most people leaving SF or NYC right now are just looking for a back yard. My sister just migrated from Woodside Queens to be with her boyfriend in Boulder, and it's based on a tiny apartment was tolerable when you could go out a lot. My friends from Brooklyn moved to my area so a neighbor couldn't call in a noise complaint on the bouncy house they set up to give their kids something to do. Having nothing social other than a pancake breakfast at the fire house was a show stopper before, but the city has nothing to offer right now, and that's probably not going to stay the case 1-2 years from now. The speed bump the cities are currently having is not a decline. The decimation our rural areas have gone through for the last 3 decades is.
2) Techies who move from the urban core (I'm an electrical engineer) usually are making multiples of the local median salary. The local towns in most cases are lucky to have us. We generally need nothing from the local community, and I live in an area with significant social problems - the biggest drug issues in the country are in the hollers of the mountains where people got hooked on oxy. We have homeless families living in cars next to fields with cows here. We have programs to send kids home over the weekend with peanut butter and bread because they will not be fed otherwise. We let kids shower at schools because they live in structures with no plumbing.
3) The Republicans in my area don't want the people making multiples of the local salary, even though it would re-ignite a tax base decimated by their own children abandoning the area, because... reasons. It gets really complex figuring out why they don't want people who only need a broadband connection and pay taxes on properties that were basically abandoned, but it's usually that they don't want the local population to change. And when this county has 30,000 inhabitants 180 miles from NYC it's one article in the lifestyle section of the NY Times from getting 5-10,000 new voters. But stick a fork in 'em it's done now, particularly with two home families that can do mail in voting.
4) Their kids left the area because there are no jobs. But companies don't want to locate here because the employment environment is terrible. Locals are unreliable employees - waiters show up for 2 weeks and then vanish. The education level sucks (because the locals really like sports but math and science not so much), and there are a lot of social problems (my wife is a school librarian and there are social/family problems here I never saw in NYC). One of the problems is local rural healthcare can't keep doctors easily; our pediatrician recently departed because she got a little tired of the casual racism the locals exhibit towards anyone who isn't white.
5) As ex-city people populate an area, the change in tax base and social programs mostly benefits the people originally from the area, even as they tend to hate us. The Hudson Valley's massive growth in the last 20 years means that rural Greene County is now getting better schools from the new tax base. It also means that there's been a renewed focus on environmental protection, as well as tourism to these green spaces.
6) Every abandoned house on my mountain seems to have sold in the last 4 months, and we just moved a farm property with 125 aces in 6 weeks after the pandemic started that we expected to take 2 years to sell (it had been on the market since last July). But the new imports from the city haven't been through a winter yet... and when they find out about snow blowers and studded snow tires and snow that keeps going until... well this year it was Mother's Day... they may leave the area just as quickly once the pandemic dies down.
Winter is coming (Score:3)
If Tahoe gets a winter like 2018-19 will be interesting for these folks. Not sure that a Tesla Model 3 is going to cut it, and once your internet is out...wfh becomes more challenging.
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Tahoe got 41 feet of snow in 2018-19. Obviously not all at once, but for many months the snow was to the second floor windows on most homes. The weight of the snow blows out decks, leaks into the walls, pulls down all sorts of wires and cables from the street. overnight you might get 3+ feet to shovel/blow. And forget about getting to the market. Winter is the real deal in Truckee and the area.
The plowing folks are good, but they can only do so much. Studded tires won't cut it, you need chains/cables,
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The same thing happened with Washington DC. The beltway people filled up DC and then spilled into Northern Virginia.
LK
DC is pretty much a commuter city; with MARC, VRE, Amtrak, DC Metro, et. al. it's easier to live in an affordable area and commute in.
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Except now, the commutes are to the Edge Cities: Tysons, Springfield, Dulles-Reston-Herndon-Chantilly in NoVA. Similar in Maryland. And, heck, Martinsburg, WV is becoming a new edge city. . .
Mind you, my commute is 84 miles and ~100 minutes each way. . .
Re: It's the normal progression of things (Score:2)
The problem in DC was that the city neighborhoods in the 70s and 80s were no longer a safe place so people left the city to fend for itself, the commuting business was created for Congress critters and their ilk (professional bribery agents).
Besides a few government-related areas, inner city of Washington DC, just ~5 blocks from the Senate and White House is a very, very, degentrified area.
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. . . or the ability of formerly-city folk to buy an actual home in the suburbs, and gain some equity AND living space, for the price of rent in the city . .
It's not always racism. I rather suspect the drivers were economic and lifestyle. . .
Re: It's the normal progression of things (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. It is a euphemism for "I don't want my family to be raped, robbed, and murdered by lawless thugs, no matter what color they may happen to be."
Also, if you call every normal and lawful behavior "racist," then the term "racist" eventually ceases to mean anything, and you've just redefined the language in such a way as to make the addressing of actual, real racism impossible.
Re: It's the normal progression of things (Score:4, Insightful)
Which, oddly, sounds like 2020 America, where no matter what you do or say, someone is going to say it's 'racist'. . .
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Claims all white people are racists.
Failing to understand what racism means.
Re:Running out of homes? (Score:5, Insightful)
I live near the border of another State. That other state has lower taxes then mine. However I chose to live in my State.
Why?
1. It Being it is the State that I work in, and they are more job Opportunities in that State. People and employers often have a bad view on distance and borders. If on my resume I say I live in the other State, people will disregard my application thinking it is too long of a commute, compared to someone in the same State that may actually have a longer commute.
2. Filing for taxes is much easier. (minor issue but one none the less)
3. The Higher Tax state, also has better infrastructure, schools, and services available, then the State 5 miles away from me.
4. I may not want to live in a City, but I want to be near one. The other state has limited Shopping. and 5 more mile to live in the other state, will just make shopping that much harder.
5. Out of Staters are often unwelcomed in communities. Especially if you come from a state with a different political tendency than yours. How much do you think say Conservative Utah would welcome Liberal Urban Californians into their community in large droves, changing their political election results... Heck I was a Kid my parents moved states, and for the next 20 years we were the outsider. And the states were not really that different.
6. After the pandemic clears up, these cities may be wanting people back to work in the office. Being local to the city, means you can still go back to your office job.
7. Friends, Family and other relations are there. The after school specials show how hard it is for kids when they move, it is actually much harder for adults to make new friends when they move, because their peers already have established lives.
8. You don't want to change your telephone number. Sure you don't have to change the number, but if you live in a different state, having to give a different area code, often causes people to dial the wrong number.
9. A general sense of loyalty to your state.
10. You don't have to change your culture as much. You can be the easy going Californian without seeming Lazy or Entitled like how other cultures in other states see you. You can be the Say it as it is New Yorker without seeming rude or mean like how other cultures in other states see you.
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I am always in the job market even if I don't change jobs for decades.
I am always keeping an eye out for a better career. Granted lately I haven't been finding a good match for me, other than my current job which I would say I am happy with. However a change in management, bringing in some consultants to handle a Re-org, a huge drop in revenue, changes in technology and products... All could cause me to get laid off despite good reviews, and a good reputation. So in those cases, I need to always be prepar
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Why? Are people too lazy to press CTRL+S these days?
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Now we just need the obligatory religious joke, and this thread will be complete.
Re:Running out of homes? (Score:5, Interesting)
1. It Being it is the State that I work in, and they are more job Opportunities in that State. People and employers often have a bad view on distance and borders. If on my resume I say I live in the other State, people will disregard my application thinking it is too long of a commute, compared to someone in the same State that may actually have a longer commute.
5. Out of Staters are often unwelcomed in communities. Especially if you come from a state with a different political tendency than yours. How much do you think say Conservative Utah would welcome Liberal Urban Californians into their community
10. You don't have to change your culture as much. You can be the easy going Californian without seeming Lazy or Entitled like how other cultures in other states see you. You can be the Say it as it is New Yorker without seeming rude or mean like how other cultures in other states see you.
1. I prefer to live in a rural area and deal with the commute, so I made sure my cell phone number area code and prefix are from the city. Nobody has to know where I live until after they hire me.
5. Us hillbillies are actually pretty welcoming. You'd be surprised. On the other hand, what would happen if I moved to the city and put a Trump 2020 sign in front of my dwelling?
10. Sort of off-topic, but people need to remember that Trump is from NYC. When he comes off as brash and pompous, remember that it's just how people from NYC communicate.
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1. I prefer to live in a rural area and deal with the commute, so I made sure my cell phone number area code and prefix are from the city. Nobody has to know where I live until after they hire me.
That's weird, I have a cell phone prefix from the country but live in the city. Why do people discriminate based on that?
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That's weird, I have a cell phone prefix from the country but live in the city. Why do people discriminate based on that?
I've found that sometimes companies do. It's thought that people with a long commute might be less reliable due to traffic. Which, honestly, can be true. Same thing for people with kids. Single / no-kids employees are willing to work more hours. But on the flip side, they're less likely to quit when things get tough. I have three kids and a mortgage so I'd put up with anything as long as Friday is payday.
The phone number issue should be fading since most of us have been carrying the same number for ye [xkcd.com]
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9. A general sense of loyalty to your state.
Is this a thing? I'm genuinely curious since I don't even have loyalty to my country, not the one I was born in, the one I grew up in (other side of the world) the one I live in, nor the one I work in (yes the last two are different).
What drives people to have a loyalty to a state? I can understand the appeal of local people, weather, liking the house or the suburb, but what makes a state appealing?
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Well interestingly one thing colleges and states have in common are sports teams. Is it just the presence of the sports team?
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8. You don't want to change your telephone number.
My phone works seamlessly anywhere in the developed (that with broadband) world. With the same country code, area code and phone number. Maintaining a virtual point of presence is no longer an issue in today's world.
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Building offices on the most expensive real estate possible has always been a weird idea. It took a plague to overcome the historical momentum.
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Building offices on the most expensive real estate possible has always been a weird idea. It took a plague to overcome the historical momentum.
Not even. Centralised working fell out of favour in the aftermath of WW2. Even before that most of the population did not live in cities. Apart from perhaps London (which had a huge population before the war), massive urban concentration on the scale we have seen in recent years is an anomaly of history, ironically, largely facilitated by the same technology (all jobs being in front of a computer) that now makes remote working possible.
Personally I think it was just a period of the ultimate FOMO. Now people
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Funny, London built an awful lot of skyscrapers after WWII. And New York built an awful lot before it too. Urbanization started thousands of years ago and really started taking off in the early 1800s. By the late 1800s we could build skyscrapers, and having one downtown quickly became a status symbol for a company.
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Hasn't the environment started to degrade in the early 1800's? I mean, it's in the freakin' name... skyscrapers. It's the lizard people, bringing us their alien martian technology to make us build the sky-destroying weapons by ourselves. We've been fooled all this time, it's time to wake up!
WAKE UP, PEOPLE!
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I'm just glad you didn't try to wake the sheeple [xkcd.com].
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Not so much a weird idea.
If you are going to buy a product/service especially for something expensive, you would want to do some research on the company. This may include taking a look at their main office building. As well often going their for meetings and seeing the clean office, with shiny glass. It really helps you feel good about working with them, as they seems to be successful enough to be a long term partner in your investment into that type of product/service.
For employees to work there, it is a
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Exactly. A weird idea. You're considering paying a for profit company for something, and you're impressed by their over the top example of conspicuous consumption. Gee, these guys must be really raking it in! Clearly their product is fairly priced! Or perhaps, gee, these guys are spending a bundle on high priced real-estate. They must be completely stable and in no way over extended! (WeWork)
Our monkey brains make us do weird things.
Re: Running out of homes? (Score:2)
No office jobs will make a come back, but slowly.
Remote working though is here to stay. To many companies are realizing the cost savings.
OR. . . . (Score:2)
. . .they work in jobs requiring hands-on, or doing especially sensitive work (i.e. classified)
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Oh, you mean like the project I'm working on, which is to cre{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER
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Just out of interest what are these 'destructive Leftist ways' you are referring to? Are these people not successful capitalists who want more space?
Re:Filthy Leftists from the Bay Area (Score:4, Informative)
Hmmm....if that's the case, why are they leaving the Bay Area?
Or are you saying they had nothing to do with its decline?
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Hmmm....if that's the case, why are they leaving the Bay Area?
Or are you saying they had nothing to do with its decline?
For the city of San Francisco itself, most of them didn't. For a lot of the surrounding cities, they weren't either. Many of them were never able to buy property, so they weren't the ones voting to maintain the homeless problem, or make it worse. The skyrocketing real estate market didn't do them any good, and did do them a lot of harm.
Re:Filthy Leftists from the Bay Area (Score:4, Insightful)
"I've got mine. Fuck you."
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Funny, I though that when one bought something it's because they'd EARNED the money to do so, and thus EARNED the thing that they bought.
Also, I thought that one was entitled to SELL the things that they had EARNED. But apparently people in Tahoe are not entitled to do so if they buyer is an outsider.
So no, fuck you.
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Besides trust fund kids and reality stars, most of us have earned what we have.
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The same way most law-abiding people do. Of all ethnicities, creeds, ages, backgrounds, and whatnot. By working my ass off, living within my means, saving what I can, giving what I can to those who are needy for no fault of their own, and relying on my own efforts instead of running to the government every time something goes wrong, or demanding that they transfer money to me that was actually earned by someone else.
Now, some claim that because "my ancestors" (all of whom were in Europe at the time, and m
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Dude, what does any of this have to do with people buying houses in Tahoe?
This reads like a guy in a tinfoil hat (and not much else) running with a torch through an army of strawmen that he just built.
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Now it will just get worse as the filthy Leftist Techies come here to pay a million bucks for a 700 sq ft apartment.
Yeah, I imagine that's what it was like in communist Russia where the peasant farmers or coal miners would buy beachfront apartments and fly around the world on private jets. The oxymoron you have deployed is a classic example of why concepts like "Left" and "Right" are relative to a persons political outlook and don't exist in the real world. They're a rumination of idealistic notions that only exist in the minds of people seeking to stoke their sense of outrage at something, anything.
In the 21st cent
Relax, leftists hate lawnmowers. (Score:3)
Every new tech weenie that moves to Tahoe brings with them the political stench of the cities they are leaving behind. Like Cockroaches, the defile their own homes and then move on to bring their destructive Leftist ways to other places.
Hey dude...first of all, chill. I'm a lifelong big tech engineer and as liberal as they get. I can tell you, that people like me love living in the city. Not all techies are liberal. Once you go into the burbs, you get my more conservatives and neutral coworkers. All the patchouli-stinking hippies and self-righteous douchbag elitists are not moving to Lake Tahoe. They're staying in their urban areas. The 40yo liberals with bright blue hair who like to brag about their education, get on twitter and
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"Want." There's that word again. How can you know what people want, when you subsidize [strongtowns.org] it?
It's like the politician who claims they did what they were bribed to do not because of the money but because they "wanted" to do it. So when I hear someone say that people "want" a yard, I think the same thing: "bullshit."
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Those lefties are only able to move out of SF because of all the capitalist money they made. By granting them capital, our society has granted power to them to reshape society in their image. If you'd like to curtail that power, you should be supporting a non-capitalist model. You may not like the lefties, but you may want to consider voting more to the left in the next election. It is support for right-wing free markets that leads to this result. (Also, a socialist model would have more regard for environm
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I see one big difference: the junk person in the country can do something to clean up the junk because the junk is personal property and the scope of the problem is that person's mess. The human waste on the streets of SF is an overcrowding homeless problem for which no decent solution is known to exist:
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yeah thats why the vote to gut the EPA and remove clean water protections and to turn national parks into oil drilling facilities. Real stewards of the land.
You know that stuff that happens on the other side of your property line matters too, right?