The Saint Euphrosynos Cafe

After detailing all sorts of ways people get around paying for usual apartment living in San Francisco, and showing the unbelievable costs of even a one or two-bedroom rental apartment, this article shows this eye-opening picture of a frail shack in the Outer Sunset district.

The rickety edifice, which looks slated only for the wrecking ball, sold recently for 1.21 million dollars !
The asking price was "a mere" $ 799,000. That's $ 400,000 OVER the sales price.

Even more astonishing, the decrepit building sold for this inflated price in the breathtakingly short time of -- 2 weeks !

http://www.businessinsider.com/crazy-th ... ces-2016-4

The large media channels are beginning to pick up this story. We can expect many more reports in the future.

Here is one from CNN :

"One third of Bay Area residents say they are likely to leave the region in the next few years over its lack of affordability, according to a new report from the Bay Area Council.

A quarter of those polled identified the city's cost of living as its most serious problem.

Residents are also frustrated with the real estate market, with 23% citing housing costs as the top issue."

http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/02/real_es ... index.html

The next sentence rather oddly described the SF housing market as 'on fire'. I eliminated that, being struck by the unfortunate choice of words after the tragic Serbian Orthodox Church fire in New York on Pascha. The images were shocking of the entire St Sava Church being destroyed. The fire raged so devastatingly that it was not put out until 2 pm of Bright Monday.

I think that we must all pray especially hard from now on for safety for our parish buildings, priests' residences, clergy homes, old age homes, if any, and our own homes and properties !

Meanwhile, even the title of this article was strange : "San Francisco is expensive and residents are over it"

What does THAT mean ? Is that some pop expression ? - ! Or did CNN leave out a word ?
Why not to say "and residents are leaving in droves" or "residents are angry over the rising costs" --

I was surprised to see THIS news after all the publicity about Silicon Valley high incomes helping to fuel the unbelievable housing costs in the Bay Area.

According to

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tech-layo ... 34414.html

"Tech layoffs have doubled in the Bay Area last year, according to a new report from the San Jose Mercury News.

And those are just the ones that can be counted."

-- Note that Yahoo is among the companies, laying off a large number : 279 employees

These figures are deceptively low, because : --

"Many of the smaller startups in the Bay Area don't fall under that category [ of the WARN requirement to report layoffs, which means 50 employees or more ]. That means the real number could be much higher when you add up the companies that have done some downsizing or simply lost employees through attrition."

The article emphasizes however that housing costs will not become lower, at least not significantly.

Still it is worth keeping an eye on developments in the Bay Area. Some True Orthodox jurisdictions have parishes there ; there is a large concentration of World Orthodox parishes, some founded quite a long time ago when immigrants came to the warm climate of Northern California, with promising business / economic prospects for a fresh start in life. How much it would shock the original immigrants, many of whom settled in "The Avenues", to see the rickety shack pictured above selling for such a preposterous sum ! No doubt some enterprising person will slap a coat of paint on the decayed wood and 'flip' it...selling for a few million next time !

These are most likely deceptive figures.

Actually many companies are not downsizing. Instead these companies are hiring workers from India, Pakistan, etc. to replace U.S. citizens who find themselves without a job, but who are required by contract to train their replacements. These migrant workers will accept a job at a much lower cost. It saves companies, like Disney lots of money. In addition, if they can "fire" U.S. citizens before they have reached retirement age, then they can avoid those extra costs. When these migrants approach retirement age, Disney et al, can fire these migrants and hire new migrants. This is outrageous.

I am moving this into ethics as it shows the unethical practices of various companies.

Thanks so much for this important insight, Maria. THAT is what's happening ? I had no idea.
I have heard about the offshore call centers, many based in Mumbai, India. Calling even a phone company customer service landed me a strong Chinese accent who could barely speak English. Same with Logitech when the mouse failed - and also its replacement which I had been saving carefully just for that day.

But this is quite different. I had no idea that Pakistanis and Indians are being hired with this scheme in mind.
Are you talking about Silicon Valley ? Or an array of companies all over California.

That is so sneaky of them to fire them before retirement. Are the pensions, or whatever they are called, of a tech industry personnel that high that the employer won't take responsibility for paying out the benefits ?

This sounds like the type of thing which is never reported by the main media. I am glad to learn about the alarming trend. There must be a lot of angry former employees who were denied the benefits they had expected. Perhaps they had labored decades with the expectation of a comfortable post-employment life. These wronged staff must be infuriated !

I passed on a job out there just because I couldn't afford to move out there.

Honestly though, I'm not sure it's worse to hire the immigrants here for less, or just move the work out to India or China period, where salaries are a small fraction of what they are here. Remember, to a large corporation salary is in the "Accounts Payable" column and their shareholders want to see that as small as possible!!! Hence why every time a company announces layoffs, etc. their stock price goes up