It is absolutely affordable—for a software engineer. Boston salaries aren’t SF, but you aren’t going to be hurting. Other folks? No, and that’s an entirely different problem we need to be solving. That’s why tomorrow night I’m going to a town meeting to argue in favor of a new 500-unit apartment building that my neighbors don’t like. (I bought this house to live in. Add more supply, bring down those prices!)

But I don’t expect the person to whom I replied to be concerned with individually solving it either, and so while I think we can solve our own problems while being mindful of our society’s, the latter didn’t seem appropriate here.

Really? I'm in a similar situation outside of Vancouver and my house price doubled since I bought it. The salary we pay for the position that I used to purchase it went up maybe 10% in the meantime, while the financing costs went up by 100%.

You don't really need a graph to understand that change...

Good on you for fucking with the NIMBYs though, they're the reason house prices went up by an insane amount.

I haven't been out that way in years but my understanding is that Vancouver is a SF-tier disaster though, no? Huge influx of semi-speculative money into real estate.

My house, on a 30-year, 10% down, if bought today at the Zillow valuation + my property taxes and insurance, would be about $3800/month. That is absolutely not nothing, but the same square footage in Alameda, CA--a better substitute in some ways, esp. re: transit--is in the $1mil to $1.25mil range, which would be more like $7500/month (if you could make the 10% down at all).

Given that staff+ compensation in the Boston area is pretty reliably north of $200K these days, these are much friendlier numbers. And again, Boston is still an expensive area! There's lots of places in the country that are cheaper. I use Boston as an example because even on the edge of the suburbs there's still decent-to-good public transit. Go just down the road to Providence, which has a thriving local scene of its own and is still on the commuter rail to Boston but otherwise kinda lacks local public transit, and you can get a house like mine that's roughly as walkable to the basics (restaurants, supermarkets, etc.) for like $380K. And if your job is in Boston you can still be at South Station in under an hour and a half of sitting on a train that, IMO, beats BART and CalTrain pretty solidly, let alone driving (which I've known a lot of people, historically, to do from Providence--and that seemed awful).

Me, I work mostly-remote, so I'm not tied to being here in the first place. I just like it here. But realizing that there are significant options is important.