Bay Area Schools Insurance Cooperative: Fill & Download for Free

The Bay Area has a lot going for it. I lived there for 30 years in 18 local cities.Here's why I left.By the end of 2017 I had recovered from personal disaster in the Financial Crisis and had managed to save $500k.I had two desires:I wanted to live in a house again.No commuting 2+ hours a day.During my reboot, I had “limited” myself to $3,000/month for rent. Seems like a lot? I had to move out of the City and farther away three times to stay in budget. My one-bedroom back in the City now goes for $4200/month.I was also facing “super-commuting,” defined as traveling over 3 hours a day to work. 104,000 City workers now do just that every day. The City population is only 880k. (Monday Note, Louis Gassee and Frederick Filloux, July 9, 2018).My SF real estate broker sent me this house for sale in the City.Nowhere near as nice as the house I lost, it's rooms are 15- 20 feet wide, on a busy street... and a bargain at only $2,850,000.Just for giggles, let's run the numbers. Say you have $700k for a downpayment (not merely my wimpy $500k) then you'd owe $2.15M. The mortgage would be $10,000 a month. Property taxes, $2,500/month. Insurance, another $2,500/month. That’s $15,000/month, before your first peanut butter and jelly sandwich. God forbid interest rates rise and you have an adjustable rate.This, of course, assumes that your're willing to Blankenship, as in the character from MadMen who can't afford to retire and must keep working until she eventually dies at her desk. Not a good look for me.OK, but how cheap can you go? Here it is:$650,000. OMG, let's hurry! It's $1M less than the median house price!Yes, the median house price in SF is now $1.65M (Case-Schiller), not that a median house was ever something you actually wanted to live in. After the Financial crisis the median was $612k. Now you can't find anything for that. The median doubled by 2014 and increased by $200k alone in the last 6 months of 2017.The magnitude of this bizarreness hit me: I managed to put away a half million dollars in 5 years — and during the same time I lost ground by over a million dollars — !I did find a condo that was bit cheaper, if a little cramped at 285 sqft.(Probably less than your conference room at work.) All yours for $453,000. It was so small I couldn’t back up far enough to take a picture, so I drew a plan:Kitchen on the left. Bathroom on the right. That's it. There was a rectangle on the wall to suggest where you might hang a fold-down bed. Looking on the bright side it does encourage you to make your bed up every day — so you can get to the front door.OK, so the City is out, how about the Peninsula? The problem is there you have Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino, each with their own tech behemoths.OK, I skipped over a few places like Redwood City because ... uh… Redwood City.Sorry, even this suburban dream in Redwood City is over $2M.Time to look for places where Fed inflated stock market and asset prices aren’t driving housing insanity. These would be places that have been steadily creating companies and jobs, just not the high profile ones that issue lots of stock. Places you'd fly over without a second thought. Wait, that's it!Surprise. The housing prices, cost of living, and income distribution in the midwest make it a veritable Marxist paradise compared to the Bay Area. Not that Marxism had anything to do with it.So, what you can get for the price of that San Francisco row house above? Let's pull up Zillow in my new home town of Fort Wayne, IN.Start with this 3bd house, nicely appointed, huge backyard. It's a 12 minute commute to downtown. Compare this to that Redwood City house.A nice kitchen and dining room.But that's not all. Go ahead and buy a similar house for each of your two kids.And because you're such nice parents, buy a fourth house for yourselves at the lake 'cause you need a vacation home, right?Are we done? No way, we are just getting started!Next, buy 6 more homes just like these, rent them out and never work again. As a retirement plan, never-work-again works for me. Sure beats Blankenship.OK, surely now we're done?Nope, you'd still have enough left over for two weeks in Vail for several years in a row, a trip to Paris, and twin Teslas in the garage.Or by all means, just buy that San Francisco house.Here in Fort Wayne, houses like the above go for $135k - $320k depending on size and amenities. The one I showed you above sold for $159k, but $200k is probably closer to the median. That's what houses in SF increased in the last 6 months. Think about this: the tech industry has created the greatest amount of wealth in history and actually brought down the average person’s standard of living.Or maybe you're looking to rent?I have a buddy who sometimes sublets his room in a house in the Haight for $1800/month. He's been collecting the rent for the landlord for years and the landlord knows about his subletting and doesn't care. For my friend it's how he affords a vacation.I asked him, "How would you like to rent a room the same distance from downtown, maybe in this house for a thousand less than your room in the Haight, $850/month?Of course you'd have to choose which of four bedrooms to sleep in because $850 gets you the entire house.Rent out the other 3 bedrooms to Indiana Tech students for $250-300 if you want to do the living-for-free thing. Remember, you still have your SF $1800/month AirBnB spending money, just get one of your housemates to collect the rent.OK, I admit that this was a really good find but I literally just popped open Craigslist, and grabbed the first I saw.How is this possible?There's a little trick with rent that you don't notice in the Bay Area. You see, in most places rents stop rising right about where people can afford to buy a house. I didn't notice this in the Bay Area because the cutoff for buying a house there just kinda recedes into infinity.In a non-distorted property market this puts a limit on how much you can charge for rent, even for a really nice house. Here that's about $700 per month. If you can afford that you likely have the income and credit rating to buy a house. That's why this house has to offer so much to command $840/month. But even still, $650/month gets you a nice house, and if you are willing to pay 1/3 of what you pay now for rent, a spectacular one.Or the Country?Maybe your tastes run towards something a bit more in the country, as mine do after living in Marin. At 20 minutes to work (instead of 90) we have this, also at $850/month.The modern house interior pictures above are actually from this cheaper house, not the more expensive one I mentioned above. (Sorry, I was too lazy to cut and paste more pictures.) It's also 3 bd in case you feel like contributing to the population. You could buy this house for $118k if you take your time and look, or under $200k easily. I overpay a bit for something a little larger than this, a little closer to town, renting at $1350/month because it was so much less than the $3,000 I was paying I didn’t care.As an aside, it’s nice that people here don't feel they have to put up fences around their yards. Yards run together. Here is the view out my kitchen window.My backyard is a large commons shared field containing a lake.But anyone could just come up to your back door!?Yeah, but they don't and your patio furniture and BBQ grill don't get stolen. Yeah, I didn't expect it: unselfish, communally enjoyed common space, low crime. In fact if a house sells and the new owners immediately put up a privacy fence, you can be pretty sure they’re not from the midwest.But aren’t they all racist, misogynistic, Republican, LGBTQ hating, deplorables there?OK, I made fun of the question because of the ridiculous things I hear. Still, who your neighbors are is a reasonable question to ask. My neighbors are African American on one side and a lesbian couple on the other (who drive a wicked purple HUMV!) Across the street there's an African American woman and her white husband. On the downside, kids here never saw a SmartCar before so I'm the guy who drives the clown car. Sigh.Yes, this city is 80% white and there are a lot of churches. There are liberal churches, conservative ones, black, white, latin, Korean-Presbyterian, even Burmese ones. I'm not sure, but I think that many who go to church are more spiritual than religious and even here churchgoers are in the minority. What they do have is a particularly strong stake in having a peaceful, cooperative community.The city center tends to be much more ethnically diverse and the outlying areas less so, but, true, it's not SF. Can you deal with that? (Not meant sarcastically. There will be differences.)What about jobs?They are coming. From Rust Belt to Robot Belt? is an article describing tech moving to the midwest. That’s good because the latest survey said 1/3 of SF residents want to get out.A $140k programmer's job in SF would get a $70k - $100k salary here, but your housing costs are 90% less. That leaves you 5x better off. If you have a downpayment then a $70k salary here is way better than $140k or even 200k in the Bay Area. Remember, a down payment here is $25,000, versus $450,000+ . Your parents might spring for the former. If they'll spring the latter please adopt me.The median mortgage on any of these houses is $400 - $1100 per month as opposed to $6,000 - $12,000 in SF. When I first got here I was looking at a $300k house. (Yes, they are starting to build expensive houses for CA transplants though it's kinda humorous what they consider expensive.) $300k costs you $1500 - $2000/month, or you can put down $35k on that $179k house for $1k/month. So use 1/3 of your $70k salary and you're in a nice house instead of trying to figure out where $15,000 a month is going to come from…after income taxes.I read of a new program in SF for tax-subsidized affordable housing and you qualify with up to $117,000 a year in income. We have affordable housing here too. We call it "housing."It also makes me wonder why the city services are in such good shape here and the streets are smooth and repaired despite the fact that we have winters. With only $100 in property taxes per month per house compared with SF's $1000–$1500, plus much higher housing density, plus vastly higher business taxes, plus fewer miles of road, and no winters. Where does it all go? How do you piss that much money away? Roads in SF were so bad voters had to pass a bond for road repair. For 30 years all the general fund tax money for roads had been diverted (Diane Feinstein, personal conversation)."Second tier" cities like Fort Wayne, Columbus Ohio, Toledo may never attract the Googles and Apples of the world (edit: they are starting). What they are attracting is the data centers, manufacturing, farming, mining, healthcare, accounting, customer service and freelancers etc. There are tech parks popping up all over the place with names like "Integer" and "Linear". The rust belt decline finished over 10 yeas ago and Main Street USA turns out to be a pretty good place to live. If you are an engineer or freelancer and can earn an SF salary remotely…SchoolsI grew up in public schools at a time when private schools were for the kids of upper class capitalists (when that was a bad word) who hobnobbed with the children of dictators and politicians. The acid test is whether well-to-do parents who can afford private schools send their kids to pubic school anyway.The midwest is more conservative, so all the rich send their kids to expensive private schools and the poor go to the terrible public ones. Right? Actually, that's got it backwards.Public education is fine out here and it's free and everyone I've met sends their kids to public school. Sure, there are private schools here but it's mostly because they are Catholic or Lutheran and not because the public schools suck. I did meet a worker in a hardware store who was sending his daughter to private Lutheran school because of its arts program. What struck me though was that a hardware store clerk could send his daughter to private school.Compare this with SF. To set the metric here let me mention that I volunteered for Gavin Newsom's care-not-cash and gay marriage campaigns but by San Francisco standards I am conservative. Thus, if a pro-gay marriage supporter of Gavin Newsom is on the conservative fringe of the City, you can guess where everyone else lies.Bottom line: the school system in SF is everything an unopposed progressive left with a mind boggling tax base could make it. In fact, there's a single school in SF that costs more than all the schools in my city put together (Willie Brown Middle School). Everyone is so self assuredly progressive yet the result is so bad that my liberal friends in SF --each and every one of them-- send their kids to private school even at a mind boggling $60k per year. That’s the ultimate indictment of SF local politics.Or they take their kids and move.Final StrawAfter I figured out that I likely couldn't afford a decent house and was destined for a truly miserable commute, then — after selling my startup stock — I embarked on the final depressing task: it was time to look for a new job.I wasn’t looking to do another startup, not just yet. I wanted to be an engineer, do QA, or product management again. My last non-startup job was as a Technology VP at Macromedia after they bought my first company. It had been $220k in today’s money with bonus etc. On the other hand my last startup salary had been “only” $110k, so what price could I command in the Bay Area now?Nothing.Huh? I had 4 startups, two very successful, a billion downloads of software I designed, 7 years as an engineer and product manager at Apple, a CS degree from Berkeley with honors, 7 computer languages. Patents. That's a pretty good resume I thought.Nothing. The lack of response was embarrassing.What happened to that programmer shortage?A resume consultant suggested I create multiple versions of my resume to see which worked best, A-B testing, just like in advertising or web design. So I did, but then on a whim I also created versions of me where I switched gender, ethnicity and age. Michael became Michaela or Huhuk, my Pawnee name. I shrunk the resume so experience wouldn't signal age.Bang! That did it.My new avatars were swamped with requests.Out of a perverse sense of humor I started removing accomplishments from the most successful avatar, a young woman of color. First I deleted the software I created, then the startups.Still swamped.OK, take out the patents, and all the years at Apple.Swamped.OK, remove the CS degree and honors, apply as a UCB senior with no experience, then as a junior.I was still being recruited, but at a slower pace...as a junior...with no experience or degree.Think about that for a moment: it's all the same person and the radically different responses are solely due to age, gender, and race. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.But wait, doesn't the Bay Area condemn age, gender, and race prejudices?When someone from the Bay Area tells you they support diversity, they mean diversity from within their tribe. If you're honest, that's like a white supremacist telling you she supports diversity among Caucasians. In other words no diversity at all and brutal prejudice if you are on the outside. I was shocked. Consider yourself warned. If you are a programmer, your years to 40 may well be your countdown to exile unless you have gender or race going for you.Sure, there is a strong narrative about how people are progressive here but I think the truth is a bit different: people are tribal. Tribes favor their own and cast out the other.In 2017, 65% of all owner move-in evictions in SF—the most anti-progressive thing you can possibly do: buy a house and throw out the renters—took place within 4 blocks of the bus stops where the luxury buses from Silicon Valley pick up their tech workers.Think about that. So much for progressive ideals.So that’s why I left the Bay. I thought about it a lot and decided the risk of staying was beyond reason. The rest of this post is an explanation of:WTF happened to my Beautiful Bay Area?Well, the Fed’s response to the Financial Crisis, as Greenspan and Bernanke brazenly tell us in their books, was to engage the "wealth effect”, that is, drive up the value of assets using cheap borrowed money. Remember, money loaned at 0% is the same as giving it away, even if it’s trillions given to rich people. As you give investment banks, venture funds and well heeled investors the ability to borrow mind boggling amounts at near 0% interest they drive up asset prices.The goal of this policy is to inflate the wealth of those who own significant assets — by definition, the rich — so they spend more. Yes, in their own unabashed words, the goal is to make the rich richer.What could go wrong?The idea is that when rich people feel wealthier they spend more and this will "drive the economy". Another way of describing this might be, "let's give our rich friends and political allies lots of free money. Eventually they might also buy stuff from the people who make things."Remember, electronically printing money doesn’t create new wealth, it merely transfers it to the first recipient — in this case to those already have assets — the rich.Why not find ways to just give free money to the poor or middle class? Because—and this was seriously offered as a reason— the poor and middle class will just save it or pay off their debts. Awesome. The astounding thing is that none of this is remotely controversial.So how'd this all work out?First, let's plot peoples' jobs/income on a large piece of San Francisco salt water taffy with the lowest income jobs on the left and the highest on the right. Now have your buddy take the right side of the taffy and stretch it 10 meters father to the right. The points on the left side of the taffy hardly move while those at the right side stretch a whopping 9+ meters. (Click to enlarge.)The taffy is the Bay AreaThe guy doing the stretch is the FedThe stretch that doesn't affect the left side much is the "wealth effect".Please look at these diagrams, (I drew them myself) as they explain life in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is ripe for such distortions because it creates much of its wealth in the form of stock. Borrowing (ideally at low interest) to buy assets (stock, real estate) is called leverage. That's what Wall Street does and it’s what got investment banks in trouble in 2008, but they got bailed out. In the meantime, we have surpassed levels of leverage ever seen before, blowing right by the dotcom and financial crises. It doesn’t matter if Apple, of Google, or Adobe, or Facebook is sound: it will be liquidated to pay off leverage when other stocks drop, just as before.Finally, it gets even better. In an IPO, maybe 5 million shares get sold at $10/share but then voila, the other 450 million shares that didn't trade also have the same value—after all it's the market price. $5B of wealth has been created out of thin air and most of it is going into house prices. It’s important to understand this because it can go away just as easily. But for now there’s a lot of new money floating around. And as the Fed freely admits, this was their intention, but there’s a problem.Trickle down didn’t.Startup founders have the incentive to repeat their success, that's good, but they tend to create what they already know and those jobs are already on the right side of the taffy. That's not to say it’s bad, it’s great! It just doesn't trickle.How about the non-founder types? Well, what is the first thing they buy with their magically inflated stock wealth? If you answered "a new house" go to the head of the class. People want to live near where they work so the wealth doesn't travel outwards very far. Instead it travels straight up in the form of housing prices.Realization: ultimately, your salary compensation is a bit less about how valuable what you do is to society and more about whether or not you work in an industry that issues stock and is sensitive to stock price distortion. Think about that. That’s no way to run a railroad.Income inequality is bad for a lot of reasons I can't go into here but when a large swath of the population sees the main economic strategy has been to give away insane, generational wealth — but not to them — well, you get the idea.How long can this go on?I don't know, and neither do you. Still, we've seen it before. On some of the charts you can compare to the bubbles of 2000, and 2008.Look at these graphs with their lock step synchronization and try to tell yourself it has nothing to do with the Fed, that these curves represent the true value of goods and services produced by these companies. Seriously?2 QuestionsThanks for reading this far. For me it all came down to two simple questions. You probably have the same.If this continues, can I afford to live here? (House, kids, schools, commute.)If this doesn't continue, can I afford to live here? Can I sell my house if home prices fall? Can I afford that mortgage in retirement?So by all means try Silicon Valley, do the startup thing if you have the stomach for it. Then if you want to have a family, live in a nice house, and send the kids to good public schools all at the same time, leave. If your company doesn't have to be in CA, then start it elsewhere.P.S.It took 7 weeks for my furniture to arrive. The moving company told me the problem was that there are lots of trucks going east from CA but few going west: drivers can't afford to come back completely empty so you wait. The exodus has begun. Central bankers insist they are starting to reign in the free money (raising interest rates and making leverage less profitable.) How long will the party go on after they take the punchbowl away?Your call. I voted with my feet.Update: a friend recently sold his house for $2M in SF, and asked what kind of house/houses he could buy where I live, with an eye towards rentals. “Here’s some examples,” I said showing him a portfolio of 60 houses/units. “He looked at a few then said, “OK, but how many can I buy?”I chuckled, “Uh, you can buy all of them.”Update 2: Oct 2019, Remax is a national real estate brokerage. Of their top 20 cities people are moving away from, San Francisco just ranked number 1. Now over half of its residents would move if they could.

The basic premise of the question is incorrect: the United States does not have a public school system. Public schooling in the United States is chartered and managed at the state and county level. As of the 2014–15 school year, there were 13,601 public school districts for elementary & secondary education across the 3,141 counties & county-equivalents across the 50 states. The exact nature of how school districts are chartered varies somewhat by county and state, but the U.S. Federal Government doesn’t really have anything to do with it. What the U.S. Department of Education largely does is offer significant amounts of money to states and school districts to enact certain policies. (In considering it in carrots & sticks terms, the basic approach at the Federal level is “making the carrots so big that withdrawing them due to non-compliance becomes a stick.”)States and counties also charter and run their own health systems, but — at least to the best of my knowledge — still depend on patients having some form of insurance coverage for the out-of-pocket patient costs to not be exorbitant (especially for people who can’t afford insurance). As to why none of these states or counties offers a public option or single-payer system at a smaller level, it’s…complicated. If, however, you boil out a lot of the details (with the understanding that the details matter a lot here), the heart of the challenge revolves around three Federal Government policies:The employer health care tax deduction is the biggest reason that we’re stuck with health care tied to employment. Unless this policy is altered, there is no way to secure the political support for either a freer & more competitive insurance market or any variant of a publicly managed insurance program— ranging from a “public option” to any type of single payer system.Redirection of funds for Medicaid (poor/low income) patients would require extensive Federal waivers in order for states to use the money in their state-administered Medicaid programs differently.Redirection of funds for Medicare (typically age 65 and older) patients would require extensive Federal waivers and program cooperation, since Medicare is Federally administered. The state or county run programs would effectively need to qualify as Medicare Advantage plans.Overall, I’m pretty solidly in favor of more local solutions rather than national ones. There’s a lot of support in the San Francisco Bay Area for more public approaches to health care, and I’d rather that the 9 counties of the San Francisco Bay Area (combined population of 7.5 million people) work out what we collectively want rather than have to rather than have to politically duke it out with Kern, Orange, and the other very conservative counties in our state… never mind having to wrangle with the residents of other states at the national level. I live geographically a lot closer to Tijuana, Mexico than I do to Birmingham, Alabama in the USA. While I will fight for legal protections and civil rights for all of the people with whom I share a nation (and will extend the same fight as far as I can around the world), there’s only so much fighting I’m willing to do when it comes to establishing programs to deliver health care in other regions & communities when those other places are holding my regions & community back from pursuing a course that we want to pursue.With a population the size of the United States (third most populous nation at 325 million people), I believe that decentralization is a good & healthy thing. What isn’t good and healthy that’s holding us back in healthcare is the tangled knot of state and federal policies and programs. Something has to give somewhere.

Okay, I’ll give you my impression of California on those two points.LiberalismIt’s not. Basically, my experience of California has been either harsh doses of libertarian-ism or just heavy amounts of super right-wing (socially and fiscally) people. I have no idea why anybody thinks California is at all liberal.Just look at Bernie Sanders performance in California; he lost to Clinton. This is the popular vote, not “Liberal elites” deciding anything. So, you tell me, if Sanders can’t win at the popular vote in such a “liberal” state, exactly how liberal is it?The problem is that people confuse the value-libertarian-ism of San Francisco Bay Area, a place whose economy is about half a trillion dollars to America’s GDP, as overshadowing the entire population of forty million people. This area cares the least (I say least, because I’ve seen plenty of discrimination, let alone the stuff going on in international news as we speak) about your skin colour, ethnicity or religion when it comes to the workplace. So people wrongly conclude that California is full of liberals. It is not. Being open to hiring people with different skin colours does not translate into contemporary liberalism. That’s just basic business common sense.Overall, California does very little to help workers. It does not socialize anything. It has the death penalty. It voted to ban gay marriage. It doesn’t have single-payer health insurance.What exactly is liberal about California?EDIT: I’m attempting to make it more clear why I don’t think California is particularly liberal.Not very liberal policiesDeath penaltyThree strikes lawGay marriage banNot very socialist policiesNo alcohol tax or alcohol monopolyPrivatized/deregulated electricity production/distribution (PG&E owns much of NorCal for example, Enron used to own a lot before it became a flaming wreckage)No-deficit rule for the state governmentCities sink or swim in the market, they can even go bankruptNo public or single-payer healthcareLocal and private funding for schools rather than state-based fundingNo help for agricultural industry, especially no help to small time farmersUtopiaMany parts of California have been historically underfunded by the government, while it levies next to no tax on its highest performing parts (the movie stars in LA and the tech companies in SF). This leaves them with the interesting position of spending, per capita, way less money than say Ontario (a Canadian province). It also has a near-zero deficit rule so it hobbles its ability to raise funds via borrowing to invest in long-term capital.The end result are a bunch of the most horrendous crime zones. Cities that go bankrupt. Highway infrastructure that is terrible.Basically, this state competes with Florida for being one of the most inefficient places with taxpayer money.Again, people assume that since Federally it votes Democrat that it must locally be super liberal socialist commie fascist jackboot land. Okay, where is the spending? Does it have an alcohol monopoly? Nope. Does it even have alcohol sin taxes? Nope. Does it try to equalize education money between different areas? Nope. Does it try to use state money to keep cities afloat on their finances? Nope. Does it try to have commissions/cooperatives to socialize the ownership of capital in say agriculture or factories? Nope.At the end of the day, the number of actual policies that are liberal in California is basically zero. If you think that sending in ICE agents to clear our illegals is what defines whether you are a liberal state or a conservative state, that is an exceptionally narrow definition. They don’t do that BECAUSE they are right-wing. It infringes on the right of employers to do whatever-the-eff they want. That’s why they don’t put in money to enforce immigration laws.The end result of libertarian policy is basically California. Don’t mistake it with liberalism.Having said all this, I’m NOT trying to paint a picture that California is this horrible cesspool. It’s not that either. At the economic level, it’s near the top in America. So, credit to libertarian-ism, it attracts all the best companies and highest income earners to the state.Similarly, if you wanted to do business in California, despite all the weird fees and regulations, it’s still better than most other states. Their economic growth exceeds that of many other states. It’s also willing to participate in whatever the hell makes money. They don’t make moral judgements on what industries it should or should not do, or maintain nostalgia for doing the “good old day” jobs. If some new industry makes money, they go gung-ho on it. Silicon Valley itself made a huge switch from hardware to software to maintain its global competitive edge.And, heck, one can say California practices one kind of liberalism; it’s home to many more kinds of political ideologies than most other states. Most places are home to many one or two major views. California is home to all the ones that exist in America and more. The reason it votes Democrat federally, is that it’s the closest party to having that diversity of views. Democrats float right, centre and left. Californians end up voting that way because they too float right, centre and left.So, California at the end of the day is not a liberal utopia because it’s neither liberal nor a utopia.