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New resident of California as of this year; was unexpectedly sent here by my work.
As far as I can tell, the workers live 2-3 to a room in rented houses, which is why many neighborhoods of East Palo Alto have 5-6 cars parked in front of 1000 sq ft (100 sq m) 3br houses.
I was in Asia over the holidays, and the food there is better (at least to my tastes), costs 1/5th as much even without counting taxes, tip, and the bevy of surcharges they add (somehow a prix fixe dinner advertised at $95 a head costs over $270 for 2), and much more conveniently located.
Honestly, I hate it here already and am looking to leave at the first good opportunity. Until then, I'm living well below my means to minimize my exposure to the 9-10% sales tax rates, driving a 20-year old car, maxing out my contributions to tax-advantaged accounts and investments in general, and trying to pay as little in taxes as possible.
A new buyer of said 3 million dollar home would be subject to property taxes in the ballpark of 40k a year. I almost wish we could level the entire area south of I-280 and redevelop it into a megacity with housing for 20 million people according to Chinese urban development practices just to spite the nimbys.
Wasn't something like that the canonical origin of Night City, of Cyberpunk fame?
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You don't even need to import Chinese development practices, you can just retvrn to the housing principles of your European ancestors. Paris proper has a density that is 3x the density of SF proper and it doesn't even have any residential high-rises and only one office high-rise.
Wait. How?
I’m willing to believe that they’re so much more dense, but I want to understand the mechanism. Is it heavily mid-rise? Is it the reduced car infrastructure? Has their density trended up or down in the postwar era?
Mostly 6-story residential vs 2 as the default. You don't see many single-family homes with garages in Paris proper.
For comparison, SF proper is 800k people at 19k/square mile, Inner London is 3.4 million at 28k/square mile, Paris proper is 2.1 million at 52k/square mile, and Manhattan is 1.6 million at 75k/square mile. SF is mostly 2-story single-family houses. Inner London is mostly 2-3-story rowhouses. Paris is mostly midrise apartment buildings, Manhattan is a mixture of midrise and highrise. You can see an almost perfect linear relationship between building height and population density.
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It is heavily mid-rise with minimal street parking, and the flats are on the smaller side, 30-40sqm or so for a 1-bedroom flat.
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You can't compare the cost of food in other countries and meaningfully say "the food prices are better there"--you're implicitly comparing them against your US salary. If food costs 1/x, but if you lived there you'd be making 1/x your salary, it's not really cheaper at all.
Yeah, being a rich foreign tourist is a very different position than being a permanent resident.
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