Someone has calculated that it would be less expensive for San Francisco workers to rent a two-bedroom apartment in Las Vegas and commute by air than to rent a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. They reasoned that a one-bedroom in San Francisco is about $3,100 a month while a two-bedroom in Las Vegas is about $1,000 a month, and four-day-a-week airfares would be about $1,100 a month. Even with local transport, Las Vegas is less expensive than San Francisco.
While most responses focus on the quality of life in Las Vegas vs. San Francisco, the point is that the latter is so terribly overpriced that some software engineers are actually living out of their cars.
The smart-growth mantra is “build up, not out,” but that’s clearly not working out. Between 2000 and 2010, the area of land in the San Francisco-Oakland urbanized area grew by zilch (in fact, according to the Census Bureau, it declined by 0.6%), and developers only managed to build 14 percent more units of housing. Meanwhile, Las Vegas-area developers built 52 percent more housing units as developed land expanded by 46 percent.
