In the last 10-15 years San Francisco gained a ton of residents that didn't want to be there at all. They moved there because the job opportunities in tech were too hard to turn down.
I had some friends like this, they just never really liked the city. Now they're all leaving because their job is not making them stay. That's fine and I'm happy they have more choices now.
But there's a flip side to that. One of my least favorite part of San Francisco was actually that group of people! I loved SF and I was always bothered by the constant complaining by tech workers who were there semi-involuntarily. They weren't willing to give the city a chance and instead always wanted to change it to be more bland or more like somewhere else.
If a bunch of those people are now leaving and the rent is dropping a bit, all of a sudden I really want to come back. I also think the city will be easier to govern if more of the residents are there because it's where they actually want to live.
(Note: I was in SF for 6 years, left just before the pandemic for a temporary assignment in London)
Pretty hard to like a city where a non-trivial portion of the residents are hating on you and blaming you and others like you for many problems of their own doing.
I left a year ago and I personally hope both San Francisco and all of California suffers fiscal collapse. The state grossly mistreats it's most productive citizens, when its those very citizens that fund the greatest chunk of the state's largesse. Hopefully enough major taxpayers will leave that it creates a fiscal crisis that can only be solved by increasing taxes further, driving more productive citizens out and sending the state government in a death spiral.
You'd be bitter too if you paid several hundred thousand in state taxes in 2019 to a state whose politicians probably at least halved your net worth by using your company as their whipping boy for years just to make themselves look good.
I can echo this. I loved the bay when I first moved here 8 years ago, but the political dynamic of the area, and the ever growing drug/homelessness crisis said dynamic is completely unable to deal with, both have just worn my enthusiasm away.
>You'd be bitter too if you paid several hundred thousand in state taxes in 2019
If I ever pay several hundred thousand dollars in state tax in a single year I will be a millionaire many times over, with far more money than I will ever need, and will be grateful for my remarkably good fortune.
I'm not sure. Most of us voted the same group of politicians year in and year out, right? It looks we lost check and balance years ago, but that's voters' choice, no?
"Pretty hard to like a city where a non-trivial portion of the residents are hating on you and blaming you and others like you for many problems of their own doing."
Fair enough!
Though, ahem, that might describe the feeling of Californians who have moved anywhere else lately.
This story is insanely misleading though. Everyone here is talking about why the tech elite are leaving due to the quality of life when Keith Rabois specifically has like 3-4 IPOs he was an early investor in going public right now and makes no sense to stay in California in 2021 and pay state capital gains taxes on those sales.
Same with Elon Musk and Tesla’s absurd stock price. And probably a lot of other people given the hot IPO market.
Point is it’s so disingenuous for these people to say it’s because of SF or California when it has everything to do with taxes and not much else.
To blast the Bay Area and state which made them rich and then flee before they owe a penny is gross.
California actually has fairly carefully considered taxation of equity compensation. It might be that the structure Rabois has put together allows him to avoid taxes on equity after he moves; but most people who are leaving will still have to pay those taxes when they finally sell.
Regarding their actions being a symbolic betrayal of the Bay Area, I suspect most of them feel betrayed. High income tax in California doesn't reflect high provision of services. It's due in part to poor cost control and in part to poor property tax policy, such that California's income tax is a de facto transfer of wealth from working people and capital investors to property owners. These investors, companies and workers have paid a tremendous amount in taxes, and have been repaid with ever greater taxation, ever decreasing access to the property they are helping to subsidize, poor services, and even disrespect.
There's no reason to assume that every tax, fee or levy that the government issues is justified. The authors refer to Twitter and other companies as being "...let...off the hook..." for a tax but fail to mention that this was San Francisco's effort to impose its own payroll tax!
Is that surprising? This is exactly how they treat the rest the world in business (e.g. Apple/Google/Amazon's elaborate international tax evasion schemes see dutch sandwich/double irish style arrangements).
Also see Uber/AirBNB "disruption" of not paying benefits/hotel taxes. I would be more surprised if they didn't "optimize" like that.
This is a pretty wild spin to me, if those taxes came with clean streets and blowjobs the well paid non-bazzilionaires wouldn't be leaving for QoL reasons. Why should people feel loyalty to a city that has tons of money to go around for bottomless budget traps like junkies and dregs from out of state but nothing of significance for the people who actually make those support programs possible in the first place? The only reason before was the money and now those earners can get that money while living in a less exploitive environment.
I think you’re echoing OP’s point. Some people come to California for opportunity, and when they find enough success, they leave. They’re not CA natives, they’re expats from places with less opportunity and crappier weather. People who want to live in California view the taxes as a cost of enjoying California.
The state didn't make them rich. You're giving credit where none is due.
Their hard work coupled with many others like them that worked with them made them rich. The same group of people could have been in another state and done just as well.
The people in California that made people successful are the Peter Thiels, Elon Musks and Keith Rabois of the area. VC money is the king maker. In the Bay Area it all started with Fairchild. It's the same reason why Seattle is successful. All the Microsoft money seeded the tech scene there.
These kingmakers have had enough of California and are leaving for greener pastures where they can continue to build successful companies without the state leaching off their work.
If they show up in Texas and other states and succeed in replicating their success, it will be clear it was them and not California that was responsible for the success. I'm glad California is rapidly losing its undeserved monopoly on tech.
I moved out to Silicon Valley in 2009. Downturns are the best years. They flush out all the folks who are hoping to get rich fast by peddling snake oil, and leave behind the folks who are building, who are inventing, who are a little bit weird, or who just love the beautiful weather. The next tech boom starts when somebody finds a crazy invention useful; that's a lot easier when people are living ordinary lives than when everybody's chasing a hot fad.
I think most bigger cities have this same set of people, though I would guess SF has it more.
I’ve certainly experienced it in Atlanta, and from former coworkers in Chicago/NYC/Boston as well. There are a lot of people who will complain incessantly about the place they live, and how it’s not as good as some other place.
A lot of those folks aren’t going to find happiness with their move but some will. The grass is always greener until you’re standing on it.
The thing is, the SFBA while everything is closed down/restricted is not the same as during a regular economic downturn when you can still go out to eat and socialize.
For all the faults I take issue with, the SFBA is probably the single place I most fit in culturally in the world. It’s where I want to be. But I can’t justify paying the absurd rents to live there when my job doesn’t require me to be there AND socialization/networking/most leisure activities are on pause. After March there was nothing for me to do except enjoy nature activities/exercise outside, and my social life was in shambles.
I can’t wait for everything to go back to normal and move back to the Bay Area, but for now I am very happy I moved back in with my parents.
I grew up in the SFBA and the absurd housing prices make me sad. I would have loved to stay but it just made no sense. I left about 5 years ago to move to SoCal where I can actually afford a house in a school district that doesn't completely suck. I paid 600k which is still a lot - but if I wanted an equivalent up north it would have been over 1 mil.
I’ve lived in SF for 11 years now and it feels like city is mostly full of people who actually want to be here now. Even in covid times, I feel like there’s a better sense of community and civic engagement with neighbors. I also was super annoyed by people who came to SF that said it’s not diverse, when it was them not exploring outside of the tech world. All anecdotal, but life in the city is actually kinda awesome despite covid, but I do miss bigger hangouts than just a small social circle, which isn’t allowed anymore even.
I've lived in SF for two years now. I _choose_ to live in SF, at 34, and I commute to south bay for my job, with a bit more WFH now than before COVID but I sometimes still commute.
I don't want to get into details but the other thing I like about the people staying in SF because they chose to is a healthy disregard for authority together with a very smart sense about how to take care of themselves and others. It's saving me from terrible depression or going into complete isolation in COVID times.
I haven't live in SF since the mid-90s but what are the complaints? From my viewpoint it's easily in the top 10 places to live in the U.S, so unless people are coming from one of the other places or have a particular overwhelming interest like 'sunny weather all the time' I don't know what the complaints would actually be.
You literally described my life perfectly, I was one of those people. I hated living there and was so glad to leave as soon as my job allowed it. I just really hope they don't make me go back after all this is over, though I have a feeling they will :/
The Bay Area is beautiful and the people are wonderful, but its just not where I want to be living my life.
As it happens, tomorrow I’m putting in my 30-day notice to terminate my lease and leave the Bay. (And I’m paying 2 additional months rent in fees to do so)
Not being tied to the office fundamentally changes the calculus of choosing where to live. There just aren’t good reasons to live here anymore for so many of us.
Even if you enjoy the area, chances are you can get a better deal by moving just a bit further away. Actually, I can pay the 2 months rent in termination fees and move almost literally anywhere else in the state and still come out ahead financially. Since commute time is not a factor, many options have become viable.
Ya. Earning a SF wage but living elsewhere is great. But there is a flip side to this coin. As employees realize they can work from home, employers also realize they can have employees work from home. They will soon realize they don't need to pay SF wages. Those who convert their in-office jobs into work-from-home are a covid oddity. Those who will be hired in the future on the assumption that they will always work remotely will likely face much lower wages. I predict a race for the bottom.
I agree, mostly. The bottom is still decently high even in Midwest cities. But if you’re making $140,000 + RSU/Bonus/Etc., someone from somewhere else will do that job remotely for $100,000 easy.
But I would characterize this as a wealth distribution, and overall net positive for the country. People who don’t have the opportunities to work at the top companies in the Bay Area or NYC or Boston now have better access. And the wages flow to those different areas.
We’ve been trying to hire these people for ages locally and remotely and we still couldn’t find them so I have no idea where you think all the talent was hiding until covid 19.
>They will soon realize they don't need to pay SF wages.
The reason they pay “SF wages” is because they can’t hire talent at other prices, not because of some goodness of the heart. While total talent pool might be slightly expanded with people who didn’t want to move to SF previously, overall it’s not going to be a big shift.
Having had a fairly long tech career working in small, non-SF cities, even getting paid 70-80% of a Bay area salary, I can tell you that this allows you to live very, very well.
Bay area salaries are much larger than most other jobs (tech or not) in small cities. I recall local tech companies offering 1/2 to 1/3 of what you would get paid for average (non-FAANG) work in the Bay. In most smaller cities in the US > $100k is still quite a lot for a household, let alone a single income. If take that income outside of even small towns to more rural areas, $100k can allow you to live very, very well.
Sure eventually we'll see salaries reach an equilibrium, where local tech companies have to offer more and big tech companies will offer less. However, for the next few years, if you're coming from a Bay Area company, you can take a pretty major cut to TC and still live extremely well. You don't have to move to the middle of nowhere for this to be the case either.
The SF-based company I work for has already announced wage adjustments for employees who relocate out of the region. They haven't happened yet, but the company has given everyone a "heads up; it's on the table."
As an employer I am looking for an expert who does excellent work. I don't care where he is located and I am willing to pay good money for good work. Experts are a rare resource which will always be expensive no matter where they are located. My 2 ct.
I've seen a lot of predictions for "races for the bottom" over the years, and yet it's hard to remember one that actually happened.
Economies usually don't work like that.
Even if some version of that happens, it will still pay off to move out of SF.
I think one of the big problems in the US is that growth and wealth are concentrated to a few hyper rich coastal cities, where most people can't afford to move. While large parts of the country is relatively impoverished.
If that ends up being spread around more evenly, I think that's only good. Even if I personally might get a pay cut.
It will just continue to bifurcate more. Highly skilled people will still kill. People that mostly benefitted from being in the Bay are fucked. High-end positions outside the Bay pay Bay salaries.
> They will soon realize they don't need to pay SF wages . . . I predict a race for the bottom.
Remote companies that attempt to race for the bottom will be at a huge competitive disadvantage against remote companies that don't. Over time, they'll learn and adapt (or they'll die).
The biggest misconception about remote work is that remote work is good because don't have to pay bay area salaries. When you do that, you're broadening your talent pool, and you're then limiting yourself to the bottom half of it.
When you pay Silicon Valley salaries (or higher) for remote work, you broaden your talent pool to the entire world, and then you get to select from the very top tier. We've been doing this for years, now, and it still feels like an undiscovered gold mine hiding in plain sight.
I doubt it, software is eating the world, there aren't enough engineers and we see productivity gains like the cloud where you can basically run a global scale business with just a handful of people. We will probably see more of those companies than less.
Yeah, that's my concern. It would be different if I was wanting to buy a house. I actually like my apartment in the bay area, but when the office did shut down I looked at what it would cost. I wouldn't save much money because I wanted to stay in California.
My employer is becoming more WFH friendly. But they are explicitly saying post-covid fulltime remote will require an adjustment for base salary and future equity grants. I don't think that would be a good financial decision for me. Even if my compensation didn't get cut I would probably end up needing to take a pay cut or move if I wanted to change jobs.
If that is truly the result then I what comes from this will be a lot more young companies and competition at the startup level- if you can't pull in a reasonable tech salary why bother making someone else rich?
You are spot on and I am surprised that this is often overlooked. The industry is either on the the track to the massive shift how it operates, or, after COVID it comes back to the traditional in office MO.
There's a lot to like about many areas of California. Which ones may depend on your weather, cultural, etc. preferences. But Silicon Valley proper I find not particularly appealing; housing costs are only part of the reason. (SF itself has well-documented pluses and minuses.) I don't live or work in CA/SV. But if I were in SV but no longer needed to commute, I might well stay in CA but I'd probably move somewhere outside of SV commuting distance.
I did this and completely agree. I lived in the bay area since high school, more than two decades ago. Last year I finally moved away from it for good. Not far, just to the Greater Sacramento area. (I've been working remotely for a couple years, well before COVID) Qualify of life improvement is huge. Weather and cultural are important reasons for me to stay in California (plus family and friends), and I still get that here. (in fact, I prefer weather in Sac -- real summers/not chilly, and winters are similar to the bay area). My house now is easily 1/3 the cost of a similar one in the peninsula or 1/2 the cost of a similar one in east bay.
I think SVs appeal is that you can leave in a quiet suburb close to a lot of easily accessible nature, while still having Amazon 2-day shipping, ridesharing, Uber Eats, and luxury retail. There's not many places in the US like this. Europe has a lot but there's not much tech jobs in them.
You are also close to SF if you like the madness of the city every once in a while.
Other suburby places with nature easily accessible usually have a more spartan retail experience and sometimes the mail/Amazon doesn't work so well.
Agreed, people are way overestimating the impact of this. Most people I know can't wait for life to go back to normal.
It's easy to move away when everyone is forced to. But when you need that new promotion when office life is back and someone else there is networking...you just gonna stay back in Tulsa? Doubtful.
This is indeed what will likely happen given how many people actually don't love working full time remote. So all these media stories will swing the other way afterwards. Also way easier to cut people when you don't have to see them in the office every day.
In my estimation, it has the most coolness-per-dollar. What I actually want is to buy a house, and I just can’t do that around here. Austin is comparatively cheaper and has a culture that appeals to me. It feels a lot like California, but without much of the baggage.
Parts of Colorado, Oregon, and Washington are also strong contenders, but I am predisposed to like Texas.
> There just aren’t good reasons to live here anymore for so many of us
The majority of people that say this are also the exact reason why the city is blackhole of culture and fun. You aren't in traffic, you are the traffic.
Nobody really brings up that the bay area is one of few places in the US where you can live without a car. Really, even compared to other "walkable" cities beyond a select few, similarly expensive places.
Nobody really brings up that the bay area has better LGBT and other minority protections than anywhere in the US, either. Every time someone mentions cheap midwest cities I have to pull up https://crossingenres.com/out-in-the-united-states-where-can... and see if anything's changed since I last checked.
Nobody really brings up the general art and culture scene in SF and Oakland. Or access to extremely high quality produce and food.
Generally nobody brings up the possibility that some people _want to be here_ outside of their jobs. It's weird.
I guess most of those that want to be here don't really comment on articles like this.
I agree on almost all of your points with a few caveats.
- Cars : The Bay Area is very walkable but that’s mainly SF. The tech burbs of Palo Alto , Menlo Park are not super walkable and you are relying on the BART and other public transport . But Covid has destroyed public transport and cuts in funding threaten them further.
LGBT : This is not really the 80s and 90s . Most big cities from DC, Atlanta, Austin ,Chicago, Phoenix, Miami have strong LGBT presence . And a lot of racial heterogeneity there too.
Art and Culture: Almost all artists that I met in Austin, Chicago , Miami , Portland , Asheville left the Bay Area . They were priced out by tech . Everything is tech in the Bay Area . Even artists have to align or suck up to tech .
High quality food: Yes, again a lot of other cities are replicating that.
The Bay Area is truly great and very beautiful . But I cannot constantly hustle at 45 while raising 2 kids , pay a million dollars for a shack . I am sort of tired of constantly competing and hustling . I am tired of being told that we are counter culture since we are not Wall Street bro’s but I need a million dollars for a 1950s 2 bedroom house .
> The Bay Area is very walkable but that’s mainly SF. The tech burbs of Palo Alto , Menlo Park are not super walkable and you are relying on the BART and other public transport .
Even SF is not very walkable compared to Chicago, DC, Philly, Boston, etc. (All significantly cheaper than SF.) Even by American standards, the BART is a pretty second-rate metro. (And that's not even counting the fact that nowadays it's essentially unsafe at night, for single women, etc.)
And SF wrt cars only to some degree. I know a couple who decamped to SF and sold their cars when their kids got older. They do indeed live without owning cars. They also use Ubers, ZipCars, and regular rental all the time.
I think a lot depends on what you're used to. I think a lot of folks accept the limited mobility they knew through school when they graduate. It becomes less acceptable as they get older. Many exceptions of course.
Can't speak for other cities, and maybe not even Chicago today, but when I lived there, there was a lot of diversity in the loop (the downtown business district) during the workday, but beyond that it was a very segregated city.
Also, though I did own a car, I really only used it on weekend trips out of town. If I had stayed long-term, I would have sold it, because it's expensive to own one there (parking is expensive unless you want to gamble on finding a spot on the street, and there are extra city taxes on gas and registration). Chicago is pretty walkable and has usable mass transit.
Even smaller towns, like Asheville (where I am now), have a huge LGBTQIA+ presence. I moved from DC, which was pretty gay, and I feel like it's even more super gay here.
A caveat on the caveat about cars - I live without a car in the suburbs just fine (Sunnyvale). YMMV, but for me a car would be more of a nice to have. I'll probably get one in a few years anyway after maybe buying a house here, but it's not something I view as an urgent expense.
And rent is sky-high, tax is insane, homeless with needles are everywhere, the city is one of the dirtiest in the country, and bleeding-heart citizens have passed propositions increasing crime and tying the hands of police. If there’s one thing I remember about the BART it’s the overwhelming noise and the constant smell of urine. The public transport situation is archaic and pales in comparison to other cities.
You can’t park anything other than a beater in the city or it’ll get broken into, and owning an apartment is a toss of a coin with regards to whether you’ll be forced to smell weed all day or not. For some reason air conditioning isn’t a thing in California either, and I’ve never experienced as many power outages anywhere else in the US as I have here. Owning a nice house here is a pipe dream, so if you want to settle, this area was never in the cards to begin with.
Maybe it’s no surprise that the only reason most of us are here is because of the pay. I miss the quiet idyll of the suburbs, those slow and peaceful days. I miss the clean air, the scent of my lawn in the morning, and having the room to stretch. The feeling of safety. I miss being able to live life at my own languid, relaxed pace.
At least we both seem to agree on one thing - the sooner I can move out of here, the better.
Yeah I don't get it when people say SF is "walkable".
No, Toronto is walkable. It's flat, dense, everything is close by, and clean. I'd be content to walk 45-50 mins to get somewhere.
In SF, I dread having to walk, bike or take public transit anywhere. It's unpleasant, unsafe, smells horrible and there's rampant petty crime. And not just one district, it's like that in most of the areas you need to go to
Man, you're sounding just like I did 6 years ago before I left -- and I realize (with sympathy) that it's only become more intense there since that time. You'll be very happy to escape. Good luck!
This analysis is shallow and has a thumb on the scale in favor of California. The author says of same-sex marriage: “There is much talk at the federal level by the presumed GOP candidate of creating legislation that would remove this right federally. I will not relocate to a state where my marriage could not be recognized.” Even if that was possible, why doesn’t that cross California off the list? Californians went to the trouble of overturning a state Supreme Court ruling to make same-sex marriage illegal, in 2008. It was illegal right up until Obergefell wiped out all such laws in 2015.
Folks in California might be surprised about what the rest of the country is really like. For example, same-sex marriage was legalized by a decision of the Iowa Supreme Court in 2009. Unlike California, there was no public support to overturn the ruling by constitutional amendment. Iowa has had joint adoption by same-sex couples since 2008. The state has outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity since 2007. (California enacted a state-wide protection against such discrimination in public accommodation in 2005.)
I’ll also observe that categorically rejecting states that have “religious freedom” laws, without digging into the specifics of the laws, would exclude most of the EU as well. Most countries have various exemptions to LGBT discrimination laws for e.g. religious organizations and their affiliates.
> California, by contrast, reacted to an identical court ruling in 2008 by banning same-sex marriage until all such laws were overturned in 2015.
This is a cherry-picked example and a bad-faith argument.
You're trying to portray the CA Prop 8 battle as demonstrating that CA was/is regressive. It does not show that. It's more accurate to say that there was a national debate going on at the time, and the open-ness of the CA initiative process allowed it to play out here for a brief period of time. Prop 8 was immediately challenged and was never implemented.
I don't like arguing with bad-faith actors, so I won't go further than saying you're taking all context away from this to get to a conclusion you want.
> Folks in California might be surprised about what the rest of the country is really like.
I visit the urban midwest frequently, and it's simply not as socially progressive as urban California is. There are progressive pockets! There are progressive and kind people! (And in CA, there are socially regressive places.)
But the support for LGBTQ rights in urban CA goes much, much deeper than it does in Midwest cities. Arguing the point is laughable, ridiculous, and out of touch. Come on, we're talking San Francisco and West Hollywood here!
As a LGBT member in a red state (Florida), the idea that California's protections or perceptions of LGBT people are unique is just absurd. I'm in my early 20's and have never faced any discrimination that would warrant an interaction with the police. Amongst my friends, the police have always been extremely helpful.
The only divide that exists is between cities and rural areas. Virtually every city is going to have a large LGBT population with its own anti-discrimination ordinance and essentially be indistinguishable with SF. From the LGBT rights in Florida wiki:
>In addition, several cities and counties, comprising about 55% of Florida's population, have enacted anti-discrimination ordinances. These include Jacksonville, Miami, Tampa, Orlando, St. Petersburg, and Tallahassee, among others. Conversion therapy is also banned in a number of cities in the state, mainly in the Miami metropolitan area.
There's a difference between mere acceptance (legal and social), and ability to flourish, no? And banning conversion therapy, that seems like a super low bar for LGBT friendliness. I am merely tolerated where I currently live, but when I was in the SFBA I had a whole community, recurring events, and there was much more visiblity to LGBT people than there is where I am now.
It sounds like you have spent real time in vanishingly few places in the U.S.
With regard to LGBT protections -- as a queer person I've experienced vibrant, proud and welcoming communities all over the place. Midwest (Twin Cities, Columbus, Chicago) south (New Orleans, Atlanta). Not to diminish the importance of making progress, but your actual life is highly unlikely to be affected by whatever laws are still on the books in certain areas. There are millions of happy, successful LGBT people all over the country.
I had a whole long thing typed out. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt instead, and assume you didn't mean to generalize suburbs and exurbs as racist and homophobic, artless, desolate and uncivilized places.
I live in a quaint little town by the water, a decent drive away from a major city. I'm a tech worker that chose to move, because city perks didn't outweigh the city stress.
I would say that for anyone considering the change, think about what you want out of your everyday life and move wherever gives you that. Do not lock yourself into an expensive city because it has something that you don't see yourself enjoying every day. In my town, I can walk with my daughter to a local beach that has zero tourists. I have a garden, and a detached home office, and a garage wood shop, and two cars (one for hauling family, one for hauling lumber). I live close to my suburban in-laws, who get great joy out of seeing their grandkids on the weekend. Those are things that no major city in the world could give me, reasonably, and are the reasons why I would never move back.
Well, if you consider South Bay, that's not true. Spent one summer interning at IBM, living in South San Jose (capital expressway). Had an absolutely horrible time. Even getting a bottle of milk was 2 mile walk. Buses were once every hour.
Agreed, South Bay is a wasteland if you don't have a car. I tried really hard to bike around, but even that only goes so far, especially in the summer. I'm assuming OP meant SF proper, since even Oakland is hardly walkable if you live anywhere but the downtown area.
I co-oped at IBM in south San Jose as well. My roommates also co-oped at IBM and either rode bikes like I did or had a car. We would ride our bikes to the light rail which were a little more frequent than once an hour. We also rode our bikes to the CalTrain station.
It's definitely not walkable. It's marginally bikeable. Biking was problematic because of the lack of bike lanes and the poor lighting. Light rail and CalTrain were quite accommodating to bikes.
Completely agree. I’d add proximity to nature: Yosemite, Tahoe, Marin, Santa Cruz, etc. If you enjoy the outdoors (biking, surfing, skiing, hiking, etc.) and want to be in a US city, I’ve yet to find anywhere better.
Sure, lots of people are leaving SF but I’d bet that covid is a good thing for the city longterm. Some tech people will return and others will take the place of those that don’t. Why? Because some companies and jobs will still need to be in SF and for all the reasons people came before tech (food, art, etc.).
SF was so over its carrying capacity and skewed toward tech that a reduction in population, a chance for local government to catch up, slightly lower rent, and hopefully a diversifying population might be exactly what the city needs.
I grew up in the Bay and work in tech and personally, a SF that’s a better balance between the city of my childhood and the tech city it has become sounds ideal.
The vast majority of the bay area is typical sprawling American suburbs that absolutely requires a car.
The cities of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley are about the only walkable places where it's feasible at all to not have a car, and even then significant parts of those cities are not walkable.
At some point the basic maintenance of law and order (or conversely the refusal to do so) takes precedence over walkability or the local art and culture scene. As for tolerance, West Coast cities are rapidly developing a social and political milieu that is openly hostile towards the tech industry to a much greater degree than Austin or Miami (to name two examples from the article) are hostile to LGBT people.
SF has a phenomenal climate though in comparison. The public transportation is lacking but I mind walking or bike a lot less in SF winters as opposed to NYC winters.
It’s also one of the only cities where cops don’t do anything about property crime and homeless people are free to harass you and break into your building and cars without any real repercussions. My neighbor worked for SFPD and we still had to get a restraining order against a homeless person to get them out of our buildings garage. It’s also one of the only cities where kids will have to see drug use like heroin being injected openly on public transportation.
Geographically, San Francisco is amazing. But I’ve never been to any other city that is as expensive as Switzerland and run like a sleazy third world country. I finally moved out after a bullet went through my bathroom wall in Glen Park. Somethings are more important than the geography.
I lived in 4 different apartments in SF in 4 different neighborhoods, each for 1 year. (Haight/Ashbury, SoMa, Potrero, and Castro).
Where I lived in Potrero and SoMa was absolutely not walkable. Potrero was particularly bad because any amount of walking meant climbing a very, very long and steep hill - as in by the time you make it up, you're sweating like crazy.
Castro and Haight/Ashbury were walkable, but nowhere as walkable as a city like NYC.
The middle ground for me was a motorcycle. Easy to park anywhere. Cheap. Great gas mileage, etc.
I had roommates working for Cisco in SoMa who took the bus to work. That was a constant topic of frustration for him. He ended up getting a motorcycle too because of the commute.
There are suburban "downtowns"/shopping districts near many BART and Caltrain stops where it's quite possible to commute and do most everyday errands on foot/bike/transit. Possibly even easier than a lot of the southwestern half of SF proper. (Having no access to a car at all - through friends or a willingness to use Lyft/Uber - does make some things harder). The older and higher-density suburbs tend to be better for this: for instance downtown San Mateo, Redwood City, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Berkeley, Pleasanton. You pay for the privilege though, and I'm not sure that it's _that_ unique nationally?
That statement is true. The Bay Area is a place you can live without a car (namely by living in SF or parts of Oakland or Berkeley, or in many downtowns near a BART or Caltrain station).
Everyone brings that up. All the time. As one of the (maybe not elite) tech people who has left the Bay Area, I can tell you that we're well known braggarts. The "SF attitude" actually makes it harder for us to integrate into new communities.
Edit: also, SF isn't _that_ walkable; have you spent time in NYC? SF was a huge letdown to me once I had lived there for a couple of years.
When you can have an entire South Park episode predicated on the notion of smugness in San Francisco, you can be assured the rest of the country is aware of, and partially buys into, that characterization.
Now, it’s not bragging if it’s true. The problem is...well, it’s a big, wide, wonderful country and world with lots of great places and ways of life to be discovered. Keep an open mind, and try to keep a closed mouth. Reminds me of the buttons that proclaimed “I don’t care how you do it in NYC”.
I live without a car in SF, partly because I used to do the same in European cities :
- it is amazing to be able to walk / use public transport to go everywhere you need to
- I just don't like driving in cities. It is just a chore monopolizing my attention.
Still this is way harder to pull of here than it is e.g. in Paris. No subway system serving all the city here.
I am using an eskate to pick up the slack. If the market street project was already completed and we did the same for some other key streets, it would be 100% viable but in the city's current state :
- many roads are in a pitiful state. I haven't hurt myself seriously yet but I saw or know of many people who did.
- car drivers are extremely dangerous
100% on acceptance, culture scene and let's add food scene as well.
how is it walkable when the majority of people need to live over 50 miles away because nothing remotely close to SF costs low enough to afford?
CA prides itself on being green and yet, the oppressive housing policies force everyone to commute vast distances resulting in even worse global warming outcomes.
It wasn't until covid came along that we finally even allowed people to start telecommute on a wide scale
> Nobody really brings up that the bay area has better LGBT and other minority protections than anywhere in the US, either. Every time someone mentions cheap midwest cities I have to pull up https://crossingenres.com/out-in-the-united-states-where-can... and see if anything's changed since I last checked.
I'm not sure how often that article gets updated, but this Wikipedia article[1] has maps that are regularly updated and is a good reference for anyone who is LGBT, or has LGBT family members, and is looking to relocate.
The rest of that paragraph says:
> beyond a select few, similarly expensive places.
Nobody's putting Boston and NYC on the list of cheap places to live, any more than SF.
That said, someone in a different part of this thread brought up Chicago, which seems plausible! Though I haven't been there enough to know if that's true! (Though when I visited, their transit definitely was very good).
Every big city in the northeast wins or ties on all of those points (Boston has somewhat worse food, but much better art). Of course, they’re not appreciably cheaper (except for Philly, which is an amazing bargain, for now).
When I was younger the only other place in the country besides NYC I thought I could see myself living in was SF, for all of these same points, but especially having a walkable landscape plus access to nature. I landed in Brooklyn, but always felt affinity for SF and traveled out there a lot from about 2008 onward. I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but at one point I realized SF had turned into a place I actually wasn't excited to get to go to anymore.
If sf can transform back to a place where the people that are living there actually are in love with their city and not just there for a work I'd be very happy. It's a beautiful city.
That's an interesting observation, though I think you've missed the effect of scale. Keep in mind, a one block town would be 100% accessible by a public transportation system consisting of a horse drawn carriage on permanent loop.
More of Portland is accessible by public transportation than the SF Bay Area, but then again, in absolute terms, there's notably less Portland to be accessed. I'd say that what you can access on public transportation in the SF Bay Area vastly exceeds what you can access in Portland, mainly because the SF Bay Area is far, far, bigger. There's also a lot more that you can't access in the SF Bay Area (and if you work in tech, you may be forced to access it).
One way to illustrate this would be to overlay a public transportation map on top of population density map based on census tracks. You'll see that there are far more high density census areas in SF/Oakland serviced by light rail, subway, bus systems, and so forth than in Portland, and that the areas connected offer vastly more in the realm of commerce, entertainment, arts, sports. The same will be true of Seattle was well.
One thing that has changed is federal employment protections. That's huge, opens up a lot of the country to us. Federal housing protections could be possible as well from the precedent set.
I live in NYC and feel the same but a lot of people just don't. They don't want culture or liberalism. In fact, I've seen a marked rise in conservatism and racism in the industry.
Some people don't care about those things, but do care about how big their house is, how many cars fit in the garage, and how much they (and their kids) look like the people (and schools) around them. To be fair when I was living "rural", I loved being only 45min from a 24hr Walmart, and I've lived as a minority, which doesn't feel great so I get going back from whence you came.
But I'm still going to say, what you didn't... good riddance. If you came just for the money and the ambiance a generation of intellectuals and artists created before you came, and you aren't willing to contribute to it? Leave, I'll be as happy to see you go as I was in 2001. If the pandemic (and lack of cool bars for a year) is all it takes, maybe people who give a damn will be able to move back in. Maybe that's not what created the wealth, but it sure did make it a nice place to hang anyway.
My personal guess is that a lot of those "creatives" that are moving to Hawaii/Sacramento/etc for 6 months (or a year) will be back, and if not, I hope they enjoy the place they choose to make home.
Yes, though it would be painful in the short term I think a "correction" in bay-area cost of living would be a good thing in the long term because more than one type of person would be able to afford to live there.
Tech in SFBA reminds me of the Resource curse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse). SFBA did nothing special to attract the wealth of technology companies, they effectively got lucky with Shockley/Fairchild/Traitorous 8 and the boom in technology that followed. It seems the local gov't have squandered an opportunity to truly capitalize on the gift they were given, and perhaps even done their best to jeopardize these resources.
This is ridiculous. The Bay Area, specifically Stanford and Berkeley, contributed to the WWII tech research initiative and then afterwards, Terman made Stanford Research Park which led to Silicon Valley.
Yeah, I thought it was somewhat due to Stanford's handling of IP. The argument I heard was that if you're researching at Stanford and make a productizable discovery you can spin off a company no strings. I was at Cornell when I heard this, where any company built off on-campus research had to sign over 20% of the company up front. Makes those initial pitches to VC that much harder.
No one disputes that those events you cite happened. However, those events were essentially random, not caused by local efforts to stimulate industry. Because of them, the area was blessed/cursed with an excess of productivity that it didn't know how to cause.
Now it's just coasting downhill, unable to maintain the altitude that it once had because it never knew how to (was never possible to?) build that altitude without a big dose of random luck.
What about other municipalities/areas who have great universities and contributed to WW2? There are many examples of areas with similar initiatives and prestigious universities but have not reaped the same outsized rewards over the past 60-80 years as SFBA. So I would posit that it is more luck than execution, and thus qualifies as a resource curse
Lots of places contributed to WWII research initiatives. Why not Chicago, where the first nuclear reactor was built? Or Boston, with MIT whose research labs churned out fire control systems and computers? Or Los Angeles, with its defense powerhouses and UCLA/Cal-Tech? Or Detroit? Or anywhere else in the US with given the wartime mobilization?
Because Shockley moved here. Fairchild was founded here, and the Fairchildren built Silicon Valley and its venture capitalism.
Come on: there’s a beautiful A/B test you can consult: in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Boston’s route 128 was the “Silicon Valley” of its time. The US poured even more money into it than they did the Bay Area. Yet which grew and which stagnated?
I think THE major difference was enforcement of noncompetes (as well as those as a proxy for a slew of similar regulatory differences).
Financial resources went to route 128 because of a more corporate-friendly regulatory climate. Innovation came from Silicon Valley because of a more innovation-friendly regulatory climate.
Guess which won out?
US reached economic supremacy in part due to a weaker IP scheme than Europe, and China is doing likewise right now. Innovation requires a mixture of economic rewards (which doesn't happen in the absence of any enforcement), and building off of the work of others (which doesn't happen with strict IP laws). Massachusetts went off of the deep end of more is better.
Coincidentally, Boston is doing better for big business, like biotech, in part because there, the balance falls in a different place. It's very tough to start a scrappy biotech, so the number of employee leaving to do a competing startup is pretty darned low in either case. The downsides of strong IP are smaller, and the upsides of weak IP are greater.
I remember reading an article a log time ago, probably in the late '80s or early '90s, in a non-online newspaper or magazine that looked at a dozen or two other places that seemed like they were good candidates for SV-like development but had failed to become such.
My recollection is that the article found that there were several factors that all came out right for SV. The other places fell short on one or more of them.
I don't remember all of the factors they found, but I remember a few.
One was nearby top tier research universities.
Another was ready access to investors willing to invest in new kinds of businesses. This one was a problem in several older places. The investors there just wanted to invest in companies doing old things or in doing things related to the main existing industry of the region.
Tolerance of failure was important. In some places, failure forever taints you. Start a company and it fails? The investment bankers no longer want to talk to you, and you don't get invited anymore to the parties and events where the behind the scenes networking goes on. In SV having a failed startup isn't a big deal.
An A/B test requires all other factors to be the same. Can you imagine a bunch of Harvard kids quit school, rent a house in Cambridge and code/party all year round?
I think there was an element of hippy culture mixed in there that contributed to success from openness and willingness to experiment on paths not directly connected to profit.
Also, I hardly think the opportunity was squandered - it's paid off for a long run. I do think there are challenges ahead for the model to continue to succeed faster than other areas.
> I think there was an element of hippy culture mixed in there that contributed to success from openness and willingness to experiment on paths not directly connected to profit.
I'd call it counter culture but I otherwise agree with you.
don't forget non-competes and moonlighting. As the rest the world has proven there is [comparatively] no innovation and startups without these two. The things like for example Traitorous 8 can never happen.
Wrt. people leaving because of WFH - anecdotally people leave for other place where there are campuses of their companies. That suggests that there is not much trust in WFH. Once WFH subsides many of those people will still continue their comfortable work and life in those places. Those "stale blood" people - the highly paid employees of those large corps - aren't really drivers of innovation (making $0.5M+ at say Google as a programming drone one isn't going to drop it and make a startup - that is one of the points why Google is paying well :), and by leaving SFBA they provide the chance (by for example relieving real estate pressure a bit) for the "new blood" to come in.
A local government is only as good as its people. It's people squandered it, though forcing egregious zoning regulations that's leading to the exodus. They claimed profits to the point where it damaged their ability to collect further profits.
Okay, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here because you said "reminds [you]", not that it _is_ in fact the Resource curse. However, you must acknowledge that the Resource Curse doesn't describe the SF Bay Area _at all_.
We have the richest real estate in country, some of the highest earning zipcodes in the country, employment rate most of the country would love to have, etc. There's no "curse" here, as defined in the economic sense.
> It seems the local gov't have squandered an opportunity to truly capitalize on the gift they were given, and perhaps even done their best to jeopardize these resources.
Wait, what?
What exactly was local government supposed to do with this, ah gift?
From the perspective of someone who doesn't live in the Bay area, it is a libertarian paradise for the haves, unlivable for the have-nots, and is the pinnacle of American culture, with its focus on individualistic solutions (detached housing, strong zoning laws that protect existing landowners, reliance on personal vehicle ownership, privatization of critical services) to society-scale problems.
Throw in conflicting interests of the residents of the cities that make up the SFBA, and you pretty much get what one would expect.
Before asking why your local government has not fixed <some problem that makes us mildly uncomfortable>, you may want to instead ask 'Why haven't we elected a local government that would fix that problem?' Tech has an outsized amount of political influence on governments and elections in the area. Governments don't exist in a vacuum, completely detached from the desires of their constituents.
What a strange notion. San Francisco has some of the most paternalistic laws in the US, courtesy of its board of supervisors. Some of them even wanted to ban corporate cafeterias, an issue which returned last year:
It's notable that a lot of people are moving, but I'd wait until at least early 2022 to make judgements about lasting impacts on SV. WFH might not stick widely, and some firms will pick a hybrid model (i.e. partial WFH) over going fully remote.
Not to mention that few places can match all the benefits of SV, i.e. unenforceable non-competes, fantastic weather and surroundings, an educated and diverse population, cultural activities, very high compensation, etc. I don't think it'll be as easy to displace SV as these articles regularly imply, despite the downsides of living here.
I lived in SV for a decade and worked in SF for most of that.
> WFH might not stick widely
If the vast majority of workers demand it, then I don't think employers will have a choice here. Leaving now is a vote with your feet.
> unenforceable non-competes
Very few of my peers have ever cared about this in practice. I don't think this is remotely a major benefit compared to e.g. state taxes.
> fantastic weather and surroundings
The surroundings, I'll give you, but the weather is "fantastic" in a small number of communities only. SF weather is far from fantastic. I don't miss it. Sunnyvale or RWC, on the other hand... But still. The weather is boring.
What I don't miss are the fires and smoke-filled skies, and the drought.
> an educated and diverse population
The "native bay area" population? Or the migrants and immigrants? The vast, vast majority of people I worked with over the years were from elsewhere. We used to joke that it was rare to hear someone was born in the Bay Area. There's not much weighing people from elsewhere down preventing then from leaving, and there is less and less weight each passing month this year.
> cultural activities
I actually cannot think of anything unique to the Bay here...
> very high compensation
True, but I know plenty of people who have moved to Seattle and New York who make just as much. And I know of several fully remote (pre-pandemic) workers who are making 90% of what they would earn in the Bay Area -- I know, this isn't common, but it's possible.
Honestly, SV has done this to themselves. NIMBYism, insane housing, terrible transit, high taxes. I have no doubt SV will recover, but the rest of the world will prosper at the valley's expense.
> Very few of my peers have ever cared about this in practice. I don't think this is remotely a major benefit compared to e.g. state taxes.
Well, while working in RTP I saw many suits filed for my coworkers for non-compete clauses.
If you're ~director or above, this matters a lot and the bigco's basically auto file the lawsuit in any jurisdiction where enforceable. At least one exec I reported to had to take a year off as a result of these lawsuits.
IMO it's a huge deal for the HQ execs of many companies, similar to how tax benefits are a huge deal to the rank-and-file.
I don't know what percentage of the workforce here has both family and enough personal connections to where leaving the area doesn't make sense, regardless of a WFH policy. It may be that they want a better commute but still want to stay in the area for the aforementioned reasons (I am one of these people).
Yeah, I've had some friends leave (to CO and DC), but I'm skeptical of companies and VCs leaving.
For a kind of funny example, there was an episode of the all-in podcast (mostly a podcast of successful VCs) where they talked about SV politics and leaving.
The irony was while they talked about CA politics to an absurd degree ("worst run state in US", etc.) when they asked each other if they were planning on leaving all of them said no.
People complain a lot (and there are good reasons to complain!), but people have been complaining since at least 1993 and it's still an economic hub for startups. I'm skeptical of that leaving.
I have seen coworkers and friends leave, but it's mostly a housing issue. As people turn 30 and want to have a family if you haven't cashed out $5M in some exit event then it sucks to live here. $500k can get you a nice place in CO, $750k for outside Seattle.
I have had older friends leave to have a family. They went to Santa Cruz, Seattle, Denver, DC, and Austin. It's a shame. The ones that stayed either are very rich where a $5M house is not an issue, or they still live with three roommates and rent without kids.
Some other reasons to complain about, but that I don't think are usually deciding factors for people to leave:
- Bad policy (AB5), Extra founder Tax, Hostility towards tech in general.
- Political monoculture (I don't mean not enough trump people, I mean it can be controversial to be an obama era moderate/neoliberal and 'woke' politics is hard to avoid).
- High state taxes that harm capital gains and new money. This is related to housing and prop13. Not only do the people that live in housing they bought decades ago pay almost no property tax compared to new buyers, they then push to restrict new supply while also pushing to increase tax on new money. This comes in the form of higher capital gains tax (there's a bill to raise it to 16.3% this year retroactively, by far the highest in the country). They also push legislation to increase tax on the companies excluding homeowners to fund their services (which indirectly affects the employees again). This kind of thing makes it doubly hard to be able to buy in and live here.
>> Yeah, I've had some friends leave (to CO and DC), but I'm skeptical of companies and VCs leaving.
>> I have had older friends leave to have a family. They went to Santa Cruz, Seattle, Denver, DC, and Austin. It's a shame. The ones that stayed either are very rich where a $5M house is not an issue, or they still live with three roommates and rent without kids.
Just wait until they look for interesting jobs and get 100 linked in messages from CA and like 1 or 2 from DC. (note: I live in VA just outside DC, speaking from experience.)
Nobody will deny that Bay Area housing is expensive, but even today, $1.5M will get you a decent single family house with a garden in Santa Clara.
That’s a ridiculous amount of money for most, but it’s not in $5M exit territory, and something that’s relatively easy to manage for a 2 tech income family: $1.25M loan is $5600/m mortgage, $1500/m in real estate taxes.
> Not to mention that few places can match all the benefits of SV
The counterpoint would be how many billionaires, besides those in the tech industry, choose to put down roots in the Bay Area? Not many at all. (The only real exceptions I can think of are Napa/Sonoma/Marin, not SV/SF proper.) We're talking about a class of people who are truly unconstrained in terms of location, so that should be pretty indicative of where local amenities really shine.
And it's pretty clear that New York, SoCal, and Southern Florida are the truly attractive locales in America. Many people choose to pay Manhattan, Beverly Hills or Palm Beach prices without a compelling economic draw to those areas. Virtually nobody chooses to pay SF prices just for the lifestyle, amenities and culture.
Without the draw of tech employment and investment, there's no way SV/SF can maintain its current level of economic prosperity.
People with means tend to locate in tax havens, not places that have good amenities. Presumably with sufficient resources, you can produce any sort of amenity you'd like.
Wfh will not stick. Managers hate it. If you are really talented you can work anywhere for whatever price you want, however most people are not like that and can only really function meeting often in person.
Calling SV compensation “very high” seems short-sighted these days if you don’t already own a house here (and assuming you want to own your own house).
The compensation just won’t seem so great when you’re paying off millions on a mortgage and wondering if the industry will still employ you once you’ve got a few gray hairs.
For years, Intel had a ~+20% geographic compensation adjustment for people who lived in the bay area. Not sure if it still exists, but if you were smart about it, and worked in San Jose, you could pocket quite a bit of bonus $$$ that you wouldn't have access to if you worked in, say, Chandler, AZ or Folsom, CA Intel sites.
The contrary might also be true: For many companies it's currently impossible (due to COVID) to make the big accomodations required for going comlpetely remote, including moving their HQs to other places for reasons having to do with access to capital or taxation.
For me, the Bay Area offers a few benefits that are hard to replicate elsewhere.
1. Cultural diversity. I'm an immigrant and having lived in Seattle, Boston, NYC, and Philadelphia, I'd say the Bay Area is hands-down the most welcoming of all of those. It may seem like a small point but my parents and family can walk downtown in traditional clothing and no one even notices. Not true elsewhere.
2. The weather. Initially I thought this was overstated but I've realized after two decades in Boston and Toronto that seeing trees without leaves for six months of the year has an impact of my mental health. Seeing greenery, and enjoying warmth, even in January has a huge positive impact on my health.
3. The optimism. Most people I meet in the Bay Area are optimistic about how a problem can be improved. That's rare and I haven't found that in other cities or countries I've lived in. As an entrepreneur that's a wonderful to be part of.
Detractors of the Bay Area seem to hang out in very specific circles of friends which seem to be rather homogenous. A solution for me was having kids who go to public schools. I end up hanging out with people who are typically not other tech founders.
1+2 for me, then i'd sub 3 with
- access to the ocean, mountains (of different geology, from gentle rollers to crags & couloirs), forests, desert all within half a day's drive.
not that your 3 isn't accurate, it would just be my #4 :)
:-) I love the scenery here too. I get a lot of happiness just by seeing mountains and the bay even if I don't hike/swim there that often. Just driving down 280 has such a calming effect in a way that no highway on the east coast ever does for me.
This is what happens when a city neglects basic quality of life issues, and allows petty crime to thrive. It happened to New York in the 1970's and took roughly three decades to recover from. Good luck, San Francisco.
Pretty sure NY had a pretty heinous violent crime streak in the 70s. If memory serves SF was pretty gritty in the 70s/80s as well.
The thing with SF is that the media and a large portion of the US loves to hate it - theres a narrative that keeps getting the replay button. They always will, and it will always die just like Silicon Valley is over and the next Silicon Valley will be in (insert any city, or china). These stories have been around forever, and they will continue forever. Yes SF will go through a down cycle as a result of pressure being taken off of the rental market, and it will fill right back in when people want to live in the city again and the pandemic has passed.
Pretty sure college is going to be in person again (UCB, UCSF, Stanford) as are the National Labs.
The media has overhyped this ... of all sources Business Insider.
I felt the same way about the source. Business Insider is pretty far from a serious news source.
I know a couple of medium sized VC people who are going to start living outside of SF proper (not the Valley), but the people I know who live in the city love being in the city of San Francisco. The people who are leaving the bay area were probably always going to leave some day if they weren't happy there.
And you're dead on about schools and research centers that require in person. Hardware or R&D need a physical space for work and security. And some people do like a cool office experience.
I don't think New York in the 70s can be explained by its own governance alone, so I object to your characterization of New York in the 70s being the result of its own failings. The state and federal governments basically abandoned the place ("Ford to City: Drop Dead"), and something similar is happening to San Francisco as well. What a loss for the country, as the next Silicon Valley, if there is one, likely won't be in the United States.
I think many people prefer petty crime to tech elites. With the upward pressure on rents over the last 10 years, even having your bike stolen every few weeks is cheaper than getting evicted and/or having to find a market rate dwelling.
Of course, it's better to have neither exploding costs nor petty crime, but at the end of the day, dealing with petty crime is more affordable.
EDIT: Getting downvoted to oblivion but I'm not wrong.
"In 2010, a two-bedroom SF apartment on Craigslist averaged $2,893 (per historic data compiled in 2016 by Eric Fischer), or $3,396 after inflation. At the end of 2019, similar units on the same site sit at a median of $4,300, up 26.6 percent."
It would have taken a lot of petty crime to amount to that $12K per year in inflation-adjusted (i.e. real) increase.
You're not wrong that many people do seem to prefer the petty crime to tech.
But you seem to be condoning that preference, and that preference is ridiculous. An economic boom should not be a bad thing. And tech is not raising rents, it is raising housing demand which could easily be met with a corresponding rise in supply that would limit the price increases, but new housing has been being actively blocked for decades.
You also leave out an important factor, most of the city that is supporting the policies that enable petty crime here have no skin in the game. They live in nice neighborhoods where they've owned their houses for decades making them massively wealthy and don't have to interact with the undesirables. It's easy to look the other way and ignore the downtown problems of homelessness and street crime, and to be so woke that you don't want any crime prosecuted, when it doesn't affect you.
How many times can SV, SF, the Bay Area, California die? How many of these articles will be written? How many 400+ comment meltdown threads about the end of Silicon Valley will we see?
Our economy is cyclical, so is the technology industry, and so is the technology industry within the Bay Area. It seems to me a large cohort of the HN community has reached an age where they'd typically move to suburbs, "back home", or just to cheaper areas to raise a family. This was hastened by COVID, and yet, the next cohort of new grads is right around the corner, just like it is every year. Is the calculus about where to live different? Slightly, now you pick from 10 metros instead of 5. Are people going to be full time remote? Yes. Can they live anywhere? Certainly. Will new grads be better of starting out in an office just like most people here did? Certainly yes.
Can we recognize for a moment that the collective value of the technology sector located along the West Coast is probably north of $10T? If anything, the tech industry is annexing new metros, not moving to them, as tech continues to eat the world.
As a perennial SF-complainer (mostly about housing) who also really likes SF, I'm convinced half the bay area haters have never even lived there, and judge the entire area based on hearsay or a single experience where they took BART from SFO to Civic Center.
Readit News
I had some friends like this, they just never really liked the city. Now they're all leaving because their job is not making them stay. That's fine and I'm happy they have more choices now.
But there's a flip side to that. One of my least favorite part of San Francisco was actually that group of people! I loved SF and I was always bothered by the constant complaining by tech workers who were there semi-involuntarily. They weren't willing to give the city a chance and instead always wanted to change it to be more bland or more like somewhere else.
If a bunch of those people are now leaving and the rent is dropping a bit, all of a sudden I really want to come back. I also think the city will be easier to govern if more of the residents are there because it's where they actually want to live.
(Note: I was in SF for 6 years, left just before the pandemic for a temporary assignment in London)
Pretty hard to like a city where a non-trivial portion of the residents are hating on you and blaming you and others like you for many problems of their own doing.
I left a year ago and I personally hope both San Francisco and all of California suffers fiscal collapse. The state grossly mistreats it's most productive citizens, when its those very citizens that fund the greatest chunk of the state's largesse. Hopefully enough major taxpayers will leave that it creates a fiscal crisis that can only be solved by increasing taxes further, driving more productive citizens out and sending the state government in a death spiral.
You'd be bitter too if you paid several hundred thousand in state taxes in 2019 to a state whose politicians probably at least halved your net worth by using your company as their whipping boy for years just to make themselves look good.
If I ever pay several hundred thousand dollars in state tax in a single year I will be a millionaire many times over, with far more money than I will ever need, and will be grateful for my remarkably good fortune.
And you are surprised that the residents hate you? I dislike plenty of cities but ideating about their absolute collapse speaks a lot.
Fair enough!
Though, ahem, that might describe the feeling of Californians who have moved anywhere else lately.
Same with Elon Musk and Tesla’s absurd stock price. And probably a lot of other people given the hot IPO market.
Point is it’s so disingenuous for these people to say it’s because of SF or California when it has everything to do with taxes and not much else.
To blast the Bay Area and state which made them rich and then flee before they owe a penny is gross.
Regarding their actions being a symbolic betrayal of the Bay Area, I suspect most of them feel betrayed. High income tax in California doesn't reflect high provision of services. It's due in part to poor cost control and in part to poor property tax policy, such that California's income tax is a de facto transfer of wealth from working people and capital investors to property owners. These investors, companies and workers have paid a tremendous amount in taxes, and have been repaid with ever greater taxation, ever decreasing access to the property they are helping to subsidize, poor services, and even disrespect.
There's no reason to assume that every tax, fee or levy that the government issues is justified. The authors refer to Twitter and other companies as being "...let...off the hook..." for a tax but fail to mention that this was San Francisco's effort to impose its own payroll tax!
Also see Uber/AirBNB "disruption" of not paying benefits/hotel taxes. I would be more surprised if they didn't "optimize" like that.
Their hard work coupled with many others like them that worked with them made them rich. The same group of people could have been in another state and done just as well.
The people in California that made people successful are the Peter Thiels, Elon Musks and Keith Rabois of the area. VC money is the king maker. In the Bay Area it all started with Fairchild. It's the same reason why Seattle is successful. All the Microsoft money seeded the tech scene there.
These kingmakers have had enough of California and are leaving for greener pastures where they can continue to build successful companies without the state leaching off their work.
If they show up in Texas and other states and succeed in replicating their success, it will be clear it was them and not California that was responsible for the success. I'm glad California is rapidly losing its undeserved monopoly on tech.
Con artists can have a long view of things.
And most people who move are just regular people who lost their jobs.
Frankly, I don't think there's too much space between 'get rich quick' and 'get really rich over a longer period' people.
A lot of those folks aren’t going to find happiness with their move but some will. The grass is always greener until you’re standing on it.
For all the faults I take issue with, the SFBA is probably the single place I most fit in culturally in the world. It’s where I want to be. But I can’t justify paying the absurd rents to live there when my job doesn’t require me to be there AND socialization/networking/most leisure activities are on pause. After March there was nothing for me to do except enjoy nature activities/exercise outside, and my social life was in shambles.
I can’t wait for everything to go back to normal and move back to the Bay Area, but for now I am very happy I moved back in with my parents.
I don't want to get into details but the other thing I like about the people staying in SF because they chose to is a healthy disregard for authority together with a very smart sense about how to take care of themselves and others. It's saving me from terrible depression or going into complete isolation in COVID times.
The Bay Area is beautiful and the people are wonderful, but its just not where I want to be living my life.
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Not being tied to the office fundamentally changes the calculus of choosing where to live. There just aren’t good reasons to live here anymore for so many of us.
Even if you enjoy the area, chances are you can get a better deal by moving just a bit further away. Actually, I can pay the 2 months rent in termination fees and move almost literally anywhere else in the state and still come out ahead financially. Since commute time is not a factor, many options have become viable.
Ya. Earning a SF wage but living elsewhere is great. But there is a flip side to this coin. As employees realize they can work from home, employers also realize they can have employees work from home. They will soon realize they don't need to pay SF wages. Those who convert their in-office jobs into work-from-home are a covid oddity. Those who will be hired in the future on the assumption that they will always work remotely will likely face much lower wages. I predict a race for the bottom.
But I would characterize this as a wealth distribution, and overall net positive for the country. People who don’t have the opportunities to work at the top companies in the Bay Area or NYC or Boston now have better access. And the wages flow to those different areas.
The reason they pay “SF wages” is because they can’t hire talent at other prices, not because of some goodness of the heart. While total talent pool might be slightly expanded with people who didn’t want to move to SF previously, overall it’s not going to be a big shift.
Bay area salaries are much larger than most other jobs (tech or not) in small cities. I recall local tech companies offering 1/2 to 1/3 of what you would get paid for average (non-FAANG) work in the Bay. In most smaller cities in the US > $100k is still quite a lot for a household, let alone a single income. If take that income outside of even small towns to more rural areas, $100k can allow you to live very, very well.
Sure eventually we'll see salaries reach an equilibrium, where local tech companies have to offer more and big tech companies will offer less. However, for the next few years, if you're coming from a Bay Area company, you can take a pretty major cut to TC and still live extremely well. You don't have to move to the middle of nowhere for this to be the case either.
This isn't new, it's already been realized long ago. I've been working remote for ~10 years and there is always a location modifier in the salary.
Economies usually don't work like that.
Even if some version of that happens, it will still pay off to move out of SF.
I think one of the big problems in the US is that growth and wealth are concentrated to a few hyper rich coastal cities, where most people can't afford to move. While large parts of the country is relatively impoverished.
If that ends up being spread around more evenly, I think that's only good. Even if I personally might get a pay cut.
Remote companies that attempt to race for the bottom will be at a huge competitive disadvantage against remote companies that don't. Over time, they'll learn and adapt (or they'll die).
The biggest misconception about remote work is that remote work is good because don't have to pay bay area salaries. When you do that, you're broadening your talent pool, and you're then limiting yourself to the bottom half of it.
When you pay Silicon Valley salaries (or higher) for remote work, you broaden your talent pool to the entire world, and then you get to select from the very top tier. We've been doing this for years, now, and it still feels like an undiscovered gold mine hiding in plain sight.
I think it's even worse than that. Once they realize that you're working from home, why wouldn't they hire someone much cheaper abroad?
I hope I'm wrong but I think in less than 5 years people will regret this WFH thing.
My employer is becoming more WFH friendly. But they are explicitly saying post-covid fulltime remote will require an adjustment for base salary and future equity grants. I don't think that would be a good financial decision for me. Even if my compensation didn't get cut I would probably end up needing to take a pay cut or move if I wanted to change jobs.
If only there was some kind of organization in which tech workers could "unify".
You are also close to SF if you like the madness of the city every once in a while.
Other suburby places with nature easily accessible usually have a more spartan retail experience and sometimes the mail/Amazon doesn't work so well.
It's easy to move away when everyone is forced to. But when you need that new promotion when office life is back and someone else there is networking...you just gonna stay back in Tulsa? Doubtful.
I've been hearing remote work is the future for many years now, but haven't seen much movement toward the goal.
Now, we are in a pandemic and everyone is forced to be at home, not by choice, but by necessity.
Everyone is still saying remote work is now accelerated, but no one had a choice if they wanted to work remotely or not...
Of course there will be some increase in remote working after the pandemic, but I think the vast majority is going to return to the office.
Not because they can't work from home, but just because they don't want to work from home.
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In my estimation, it has the most coolness-per-dollar. What I actually want is to buy a house, and I just can’t do that around here. Austin is comparatively cheaper and has a culture that appeals to me. It feels a lot like California, but without much of the baggage.
Parts of Colorado, Oregon, and Washington are also strong contenders, but I am predisposed to like Texas.
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The majority of people that say this are also the exact reason why the city is blackhole of culture and fun. You aren't in traffic, you are the traffic.
Nobody really brings up that the bay area has better LGBT and other minority protections than anywhere in the US, either. Every time someone mentions cheap midwest cities I have to pull up https://crossingenres.com/out-in-the-united-states-where-can... and see if anything's changed since I last checked.
Nobody really brings up the general art and culture scene in SF and Oakland. Or access to extremely high quality produce and food.
Generally nobody brings up the possibility that some people _want to be here_ outside of their jobs. It's weird.
I guess most of those that want to be here don't really comment on articles like this.
LGBT : This is not really the 80s and 90s . Most big cities from DC, Atlanta, Austin ,Chicago, Phoenix, Miami have strong LGBT presence . And a lot of racial heterogeneity there too.
Art and Culture: Almost all artists that I met in Austin, Chicago , Miami , Portland , Asheville left the Bay Area . They were priced out by tech . Everything is tech in the Bay Area . Even artists have to align or suck up to tech .
High quality food: Yes, again a lot of other cities are replicating that.
The Bay Area is truly great and very beautiful . But I cannot constantly hustle at 45 while raising 2 kids , pay a million dollars for a shack . I am sort of tired of constantly competing and hustling . I am tired of being told that we are counter culture since we are not Wall Street bro’s but I need a million dollars for a 1950s 2 bedroom house .
Even SF is not very walkable compared to Chicago, DC, Philly, Boston, etc. (All significantly cheaper than SF.) Even by American standards, the BART is a pretty second-rate metro. (And that's not even counting the fact that nowadays it's essentially unsafe at night, for single women, etc.)
I think a lot depends on what you're used to. I think a lot of folks accept the limited mobility they knew through school when they graduate. It becomes less acceptable as they get older. Many exceptions of course.
Also, though I did own a car, I really only used it on weekend trips out of town. If I had stayed long-term, I would have sold it, because it's expensive to own one there (parking is expensive unless you want to gamble on finding a spot on the street, and there are extra city taxes on gas and registration). Chicago is pretty walkable and has usable mass transit.
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You can’t park anything other than a beater in the city or it’ll get broken into, and owning an apartment is a toss of a coin with regards to whether you’ll be forced to smell weed all day or not. For some reason air conditioning isn’t a thing in California either, and I’ve never experienced as many power outages anywhere else in the US as I have here. Owning a nice house here is a pipe dream, so if you want to settle, this area was never in the cards to begin with.
Maybe it’s no surprise that the only reason most of us are here is because of the pay. I miss the quiet idyll of the suburbs, those slow and peaceful days. I miss the clean air, the scent of my lawn in the morning, and having the room to stretch. The feeling of safety. I miss being able to live life at my own languid, relaxed pace.
At least we both seem to agree on one thing - the sooner I can move out of here, the better.
No, Toronto is walkable. It's flat, dense, everything is close by, and clean. I'd be content to walk 45-50 mins to get somewhere.
In SF, I dread having to walk, bike or take public transit anywhere. It's unpleasant, unsafe, smells horrible and there's rampant petty crime. And not just one district, it's like that in most of the areas you need to go to
This analysis is shallow and has a thumb on the scale in favor of California. The author says of same-sex marriage: “There is much talk at the federal level by the presumed GOP candidate of creating legislation that would remove this right federally. I will not relocate to a state where my marriage could not be recognized.” Even if that was possible, why doesn’t that cross California off the list? Californians went to the trouble of overturning a state Supreme Court ruling to make same-sex marriage illegal, in 2008. It was illegal right up until Obergefell wiped out all such laws in 2015.
Folks in California might be surprised about what the rest of the country is really like. For example, same-sex marriage was legalized by a decision of the Iowa Supreme Court in 2009. Unlike California, there was no public support to overturn the ruling by constitutional amendment. Iowa has had joint adoption by same-sex couples since 2008. The state has outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity since 2007. (California enacted a state-wide protection against such discrimination in public accommodation in 2005.)
I’ll also observe that categorically rejecting states that have “religious freedom” laws, without digging into the specifics of the laws, would exclude most of the EU as well. Most countries have various exemptions to LGBT discrimination laws for e.g. religious organizations and their affiliates.
This is a cherry-picked example and a bad-faith argument.
You're trying to portray the CA Prop 8 battle as demonstrating that CA was/is regressive. It does not show that. It's more accurate to say that there was a national debate going on at the time, and the open-ness of the CA initiative process allowed it to play out here for a brief period of time. Prop 8 was immediately challenged and was never implemented.
I don't like arguing with bad-faith actors, so I won't go further than saying you're taking all context away from this to get to a conclusion you want.
> Folks in California might be surprised about what the rest of the country is really like.
I visit the urban midwest frequently, and it's simply not as socially progressive as urban California is. There are progressive pockets! There are progressive and kind people! (And in CA, there are socially regressive places.)
But the support for LGBTQ rights in urban CA goes much, much deeper than it does in Midwest cities. Arguing the point is laughable, ridiculous, and out of touch. Come on, we're talking San Francisco and West Hollywood here!
The only divide that exists is between cities and rural areas. Virtually every city is going to have a large LGBT population with its own anti-discrimination ordinance and essentially be indistinguishable with SF. From the LGBT rights in Florida wiki:
>In addition, several cities and counties, comprising about 55% of Florida's population, have enacted anti-discrimination ordinances. These include Jacksonville, Miami, Tampa, Orlando, St. Petersburg, and Tallahassee, among others. Conversion therapy is also banned in a number of cities in the state, mainly in the Miami metropolitan area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Florida
With regard to LGBT protections -- as a queer person I've experienced vibrant, proud and welcoming communities all over the place. Midwest (Twin Cities, Columbus, Chicago) south (New Orleans, Atlanta). Not to diminish the importance of making progress, but your actual life is highly unlikely to be affected by whatever laws are still on the books in certain areas. There are millions of happy, successful LGBT people all over the country.
I live in a quaint little town by the water, a decent drive away from a major city. I'm a tech worker that chose to move, because city perks didn't outweigh the city stress.
I would say that for anyone considering the change, think about what you want out of your everyday life and move wherever gives you that. Do not lock yourself into an expensive city because it has something that you don't see yourself enjoying every day. In my town, I can walk with my daughter to a local beach that has zero tourists. I have a garden, and a detached home office, and a garage wood shop, and two cars (one for hauling family, one for hauling lumber). I live close to my suburban in-laws, who get great joy out of seeing their grandkids on the weekend. Those are things that no major city in the world could give me, reasonably, and are the reasons why I would never move back.
It's definitely not walkable. It's marginally bikeable. Biking was problematic because of the lack of bike lanes and the poor lighting. Light rail and CalTrain were quite accommodating to bikes.
Sure, lots of people are leaving SF but I’d bet that covid is a good thing for the city longterm. Some tech people will return and others will take the place of those that don’t. Why? Because some companies and jobs will still need to be in SF and for all the reasons people came before tech (food, art, etc.).
SF was so over its carrying capacity and skewed toward tech that a reduction in population, a chance for local government to catch up, slightly lower rent, and hopefully a diversifying population might be exactly what the city needs.
I grew up in the Bay and work in tech and personally, a SF that’s a better balance between the city of my childhood and the tech city it has become sounds ideal.
The cities of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley are about the only walkable places where it's feasible at all to not have a car, and even then significant parts of those cities are not walkable.
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Also I find that many people who proudly refuse to own a car in SF just end up ubering everywhere.
Geographically, San Francisco is amazing. But I’ve never been to any other city that is as expensive as Switzerland and run like a sleazy third world country. I finally moved out after a bullet went through my bathroom wall in Glen Park. Somethings are more important than the geography.
Is this true? I've only visited the bay for a total of 15 days but only SF and parts of Oakland seemed walkable.
Where I lived in Potrero and SoMa was absolutely not walkable. Potrero was particularly bad because any amount of walking meant climbing a very, very long and steep hill - as in by the time you make it up, you're sweating like crazy.
Castro and Haight/Ashbury were walkable, but nowhere as walkable as a city like NYC.
The middle ground for me was a motorcycle. Easy to park anywhere. Cheap. Great gas mileage, etc.
I had roommates working for Cisco in SoMa who took the bus to work. That was a constant topic of frustration for him. He ended up getting a motorcycle too because of the commute.
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Edit: also, SF isn't _that_ walkable; have you spent time in NYC? SF was a huge letdown to me once I had lived there for a couple of years.
https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Smug_Alert!
Now, it’s not bragging if it’s true. The problem is...well, it’s a big, wide, wonderful country and world with lots of great places and ways of life to be discovered. Keep an open mind, and try to keep a closed mouth. Reminds me of the buttons that proclaimed “I don’t care how you do it in NYC”.
- it is amazing to be able to walk / use public transport to go everywhere you need to
- I just don't like driving in cities. It is just a chore monopolizing my attention.
Still this is way harder to pull of here than it is e.g. in Paris. No subway system serving all the city here.
I am using an eskate to pick up the slack. If the market street project was already completed and we did the same for some other key streets, it would be 100% viable but in the city's current state :
- many roads are in a pitiful state. I haven't hurt myself seriously yet but I saw or know of many people who did.
- car drivers are extremely dangerous
100% on acceptance, culture scene and let's add food scene as well.
CA prides itself on being green and yet, the oppressive housing policies force everyone to commute vast distances resulting in even worse global warming outcomes.
It wasn't until covid came along that we finally even allowed people to start telecommute on a wide scale
I'm not sure how often that article gets updated, but this Wikipedia article[1] has maps that are regularly updated and is a good reference for anyone who is LGBT, or has LGBT family members, and is looking to relocate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Stat...
Not really, not compared to Boston or, particularly, New York.
Nobody's putting Boston and NYC on the list of cheap places to live, any more than SF.
That said, someone in a different part of this thread brought up Chicago, which seems plausible! Though I haven't been there enough to know if that's true! (Though when I visited, their transit definitely was very good).
Safe, walkable, low pollution, high density of tech co's, beautiful people.
Nice city though.
It’s a great city for some. If you like it - I do hope you enjoy it and stay for as long as you wish.
I have long left and prefer other states like Texas and the South. It’s more my style.
If sf can transform back to a place where the people that are living there actually are in love with their city and not just there for a work I'd be very happy. It's a beautiful city.
I'm not sure what bay area are you talking about. The SF bay area is absolutely unmanageable without a car, unlike Portland or Seattle.
More of Portland is accessible by public transportation than the SF Bay Area, but then again, in absolute terms, there's notably less Portland to be accessed. I'd say that what you can access on public transportation in the SF Bay Area vastly exceeds what you can access in Portland, mainly because the SF Bay Area is far, far, bigger. There's also a lot more that you can't access in the SF Bay Area (and if you work in tech, you may be forced to access it).
One way to illustrate this would be to overlay a public transportation map on top of population density map based on census tracks. You'll see that there are far more high density census areas in SF/Oakland serviced by light rail, subway, bus systems, and so forth than in Portland, and that the areas connected offer vastly more in the realm of commerce, entertainment, arts, sports. The same will be true of Seattle was well.
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But I'm still going to say, what you didn't... good riddance. If you came just for the money and the ambiance a generation of intellectuals and artists created before you came, and you aren't willing to contribute to it? Leave, I'll be as happy to see you go as I was in 2001. If the pandemic (and lack of cool bars for a year) is all it takes, maybe people who give a damn will be able to move back in. Maybe that's not what created the wealth, but it sure did make it a nice place to hang anyway.
My personal guess is that a lot of those "creatives" that are moving to Hawaii/Sacramento/etc for 6 months (or a year) will be back, and if not, I hope they enjoy the place they choose to make home.
Perhaps I'm misreading you, but having to drive 45mins to get to a shop seems like a massive inconvenience!
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Now it's just coasting downhill, unable to maintain the altitude that it once had because it never knew how to (was never possible to?) build that altitude without a big dose of random luck.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
Because Shockley moved here. Fairchild was founded here, and the Fairchildren built Silicon Valley and its venture capitalism.
Financial resources went to route 128 because of a more corporate-friendly regulatory climate. Innovation came from Silicon Valley because of a more innovation-friendly regulatory climate.
Guess which won out?
US reached economic supremacy in part due to a weaker IP scheme than Europe, and China is doing likewise right now. Innovation requires a mixture of economic rewards (which doesn't happen in the absence of any enforcement), and building off of the work of others (which doesn't happen with strict IP laws). Massachusetts went off of the deep end of more is better.
Coincidentally, Boston is doing better for big business, like biotech, in part because there, the balance falls in a different place. It's very tough to start a scrappy biotech, so the number of employee leaving to do a competing startup is pretty darned low in either case. The downsides of strong IP are smaller, and the upsides of weak IP are greater.
My recollection is that the article found that there were several factors that all came out right for SV. The other places fell short on one or more of them.
I don't remember all of the factors they found, but I remember a few.
One was nearby top tier research universities.
Another was ready access to investors willing to invest in new kinds of businesses. This one was a problem in several older places. The investors there just wanted to invest in companies doing old things or in doing things related to the main existing industry of the region.
Tolerance of failure was important. In some places, failure forever taints you. Start a company and it fails? The investment bankers no longer want to talk to you, and you don't get invited anymore to the parties and events where the behind the scenes networking goes on. In SV having a failed startup isn't a big deal.
I’ve lived and worked in both. None of the things I prefer about SF have anything to do with the efforts of local governments.
If anything, I’d agree that the local governments efforts and misguided policies are responsible for most of what I dislike most about living in SF.
So much is handled so incredibly poorly, but everyone’s willing to put up with it for proximity to a giant money-making machine spewing wealth around.
Also, I hardly think the opportunity was squandered - it's paid off for a long run. I do think there are challenges ahead for the model to continue to succeed faster than other areas.
I'd call it counter culture but I otherwise agree with you.
California has laws that make it safe and easy for employees to go form a startup at the drop of a hat.
In California, regardless of their employee contract, employees own the inventions:
- made in their own time
- made without using the employers equipment or technology
Other states (Texas?) give employers an enormous amount of power over their employees, even giving them rights to the ideas in their heads.
Wrt. people leaving because of WFH - anecdotally people leave for other place where there are campuses of their companies. That suggests that there is not much trust in WFH. Once WFH subsides many of those people will still continue their comfortable work and life in those places. Those "stale blood" people - the highly paid employees of those large corps - aren't really drivers of innovation (making $0.5M+ at say Google as a programming drone one isn't going to drop it and make a startup - that is one of the points why Google is paying well :), and by leaving SFBA they provide the chance (by for example relieving real estate pressure a bit) for the "new blood" to come in.
Okay, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here because you said "reminds [you]", not that it _is_ in fact the Resource curse. However, you must acknowledge that the Resource Curse doesn't describe the SF Bay Area _at all_.
We have the richest real estate in country, some of the highest earning zipcodes in the country, employment rate most of the country would love to have, etc. There's no "curse" here, as defined in the economic sense.
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Wait, what?
What exactly was local government supposed to do with this, ah gift?
From the perspective of someone who doesn't live in the Bay area, it is a libertarian paradise for the haves, unlivable for the have-nots, and is the pinnacle of American culture, with its focus on individualistic solutions (detached housing, strong zoning laws that protect existing landowners, reliance on personal vehicle ownership, privatization of critical services) to society-scale problems.
Throw in conflicting interests of the residents of the cities that make up the SFBA, and you pretty much get what one would expect.
Before asking why your local government has not fixed <some problem that makes us mildly uncomfortable>, you may want to instead ask 'Why haven't we elected a local government that would fix that problem?' Tech has an outsized amount of political influence on governments and elections in the area. Governments don't exist in a vacuum, completely detached from the desires of their constituents.
> libertarian paradise
What a strange notion. San Francisco has some of the most paternalistic laws in the US, courtesy of its board of supervisors. Some of them even wanted to ban corporate cafeterias, an issue which returned last year:
https://sfist.com/2019/07/22/watered-down-version-of-sfs-tec...
To pin the blame for these problems on libertarians, of all people, is the height of absurdity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_in_the_San_Francisco_...
See also:
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/OPINION-San-Francisc...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Nanny-state-or-...
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-nov-02-la-fi-ha...
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/economic...
https://reason.org/policy-study/us-metropolitan-area-economi...
> zoning laws
Where did you get the bizarre idea that their zoning laws are in any way “libertarian” or “individualist”?
https://marketurbanismreport.com/blog/san-franciscos-regulat...
Not to mention that few places can match all the benefits of SV, i.e. unenforceable non-competes, fantastic weather and surroundings, an educated and diverse population, cultural activities, very high compensation, etc. I don't think it'll be as easy to displace SV as these articles regularly imply, despite the downsides of living here.
> WFH might not stick widely
If the vast majority of workers demand it, then I don't think employers will have a choice here. Leaving now is a vote with your feet.
> unenforceable non-competes
Very few of my peers have ever cared about this in practice. I don't think this is remotely a major benefit compared to e.g. state taxes.
> fantastic weather and surroundings
The surroundings, I'll give you, but the weather is "fantastic" in a small number of communities only. SF weather is far from fantastic. I don't miss it. Sunnyvale or RWC, on the other hand... But still. The weather is boring.
What I don't miss are the fires and smoke-filled skies, and the drought.
> an educated and diverse population
The "native bay area" population? Or the migrants and immigrants? The vast, vast majority of people I worked with over the years were from elsewhere. We used to joke that it was rare to hear someone was born in the Bay Area. There's not much weighing people from elsewhere down preventing then from leaving, and there is less and less weight each passing month this year.
> cultural activities
I actually cannot think of anything unique to the Bay here...
> very high compensation
True, but I know plenty of people who have moved to Seattle and New York who make just as much. And I know of several fully remote (pre-pandemic) workers who are making 90% of what they would earn in the Bay Area -- I know, this isn't common, but it's possible.
Honestly, SV has done this to themselves. NIMBYism, insane housing, terrible transit, high taxes. I have no doubt SV will recover, but the rest of the world will prosper at the valley's expense.
Well, while working in RTP I saw many suits filed for my coworkers for non-compete clauses.
If you're ~director or above, this matters a lot and the bigco's basically auto file the lawsuit in any jurisdiction where enforceable. At least one exec I reported to had to take a year off as a result of these lawsuits.
IMO it's a huge deal for the HQ execs of many companies, similar to how tax benefits are a huge deal to the rank-and-file.
I don't know what percentage of the workforce here has both family and enough personal connections to where leaving the area doesn't make sense, regardless of a WFH policy. It may be that they want a better commute but still want to stay in the area for the aforementioned reasons (I am one of these people).
> I actually cannot think of anything unique to the Bay here...
https://kfjc.org/events/psychotronix
https://kofytv.com/dance-party/
For a kind of funny example, there was an episode of the all-in podcast (mostly a podcast of successful VCs) where they talked about SV politics and leaving.
The irony was while they talked about CA politics to an absurd degree ("worst run state in US", etc.) when they asked each other if they were planning on leaving all of them said no.
People complain a lot (and there are good reasons to complain!), but people have been complaining since at least 1993 and it's still an economic hub for startups. I'm skeptical of that leaving.
I have seen coworkers and friends leave, but it's mostly a housing issue. As people turn 30 and want to have a family if you haven't cashed out $5M in some exit event then it sucks to live here. $500k can get you a nice place in CO, $750k for outside Seattle.
I have had older friends leave to have a family. They went to Santa Cruz, Seattle, Denver, DC, and Austin. It's a shame. The ones that stayed either are very rich where a $5M house is not an issue, or they still live with three roommates and rent without kids.
Some other reasons to complain about, but that I don't think are usually deciding factors for people to leave:
- Bad policy (AB5), Extra founder Tax, Hostility towards tech in general.
- Political monoculture (I don't mean not enough trump people, I mean it can be controversial to be an obama era moderate/neoliberal and 'woke' politics is hard to avoid).
- High state taxes that harm capital gains and new money. This is related to housing and prop13. Not only do the people that live in housing they bought decades ago pay almost no property tax compared to new buyers, they then push to restrict new supply while also pushing to increase tax on new money. This comes in the form of higher capital gains tax (there's a bill to raise it to 16.3% this year retroactively, by far the highest in the country). They also push legislation to increase tax on the companies excluding homeowners to fund their services (which indirectly affects the employees again). This kind of thing makes it doubly hard to be able to buy in and live here.
>> I have had older friends leave to have a family. They went to Santa Cruz, Seattle, Denver, DC, and Austin. It's a shame. The ones that stayed either are very rich where a $5M house is not an issue, or they still live with three roommates and rent without kids.
Just wait until they look for interesting jobs and get 100 linked in messages from CA and like 1 or 2 from DC. (note: I live in VA just outside DC, speaking from experience.)
Nobody will deny that Bay Area housing is expensive, but even today, $1.5M will get you a decent single family house with a garden in Santa Clara.
That’s a ridiculous amount of money for most, but it’s not in $5M exit territory, and something that’s relatively easy to manage for a 2 tech income family: $1.25M loan is $5600/m mortgage, $1500/m in real estate taxes.
The counterpoint would be how many billionaires, besides those in the tech industry, choose to put down roots in the Bay Area? Not many at all. (The only real exceptions I can think of are Napa/Sonoma/Marin, not SV/SF proper.) We're talking about a class of people who are truly unconstrained in terms of location, so that should be pretty indicative of where local amenities really shine.
And it's pretty clear that New York, SoCal, and Southern Florida are the truly attractive locales in America. Many people choose to pay Manhattan, Beverly Hills or Palm Beach prices without a compelling economic draw to those areas. Virtually nobody chooses to pay SF prices just for the lifestyle, amenities and culture.
Without the draw of tech employment and investment, there's no way SV/SF can maintain its current level of economic prosperity.
Who ever cares what managers think. It is the owners who matter as they're the ones paying bills.
>"however most people are not like that and can only really function meeting often in person"
Well, when your ability to make a living is at stake your ability to function independent of location might suddenly improve.
Care to provide evidence for this claim?
The compensation just won’t seem so great when you’re paying off millions on a mortgage and wondering if the industry will still employ you once you’ve got a few gray hairs.
If you changed sites you lost this compensation.
The contrary might also be true: For many companies it's currently impossible (due to COVID) to make the big accomodations required for going comlpetely remote, including moving their HQs to other places for reasons having to do with access to capital or taxation.
1. Cultural diversity. I'm an immigrant and having lived in Seattle, Boston, NYC, and Philadelphia, I'd say the Bay Area is hands-down the most welcoming of all of those. It may seem like a small point but my parents and family can walk downtown in traditional clothing and no one even notices. Not true elsewhere.
2. The weather. Initially I thought this was overstated but I've realized after two decades in Boston and Toronto that seeing trees without leaves for six months of the year has an impact of my mental health. Seeing greenery, and enjoying warmth, even in January has a huge positive impact on my health.
3. The optimism. Most people I meet in the Bay Area are optimistic about how a problem can be improved. That's rare and I haven't found that in other cities or countries I've lived in. As an entrepreneur that's a wonderful to be part of.
Detractors of the Bay Area seem to hang out in very specific circles of friends which seem to be rather homogenous. A solution for me was having kids who go to public schools. I end up hanging out with people who are typically not other tech founders.
not that your 3 isn't accurate, it would just be my #4 :)
The thing with SF is that the media and a large portion of the US loves to hate it - theres a narrative that keeps getting the replay button. They always will, and it will always die just like Silicon Valley is over and the next Silicon Valley will be in (insert any city, or china). These stories have been around forever, and they will continue forever. Yes SF will go through a down cycle as a result of pressure being taken off of the rental market, and it will fill right back in when people want to live in the city again and the pandemic has passed.
Pretty sure college is going to be in person again (UCB, UCSF, Stanford) as are the National Labs.
The media has overhyped this ... of all sources Business Insider.
I know a couple of medium sized VC people who are going to start living outside of SF proper (not the Valley), but the people I know who live in the city love being in the city of San Francisco. The people who are leaving the bay area were probably always going to leave some day if they weren't happy there.
And you're dead on about schools and research centers that require in person. Hardware or R&D need a physical space for work and security. And some people do like a cool office experience.
Anyway, tl;dr I agree with you, ha ha.
Of course, it's better to have neither exploding costs nor petty crime, but at the end of the day, dealing with petty crime is more affordable.
EDIT: Getting downvoted to oblivion but I'm not wrong.
https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/12/21001080/san-francisco-sf-r...
"In 2010, a two-bedroom SF apartment on Craigslist averaged $2,893 (per historic data compiled in 2016 by Eric Fischer), or $3,396 after inflation. At the end of 2019, similar units on the same site sit at a median of $4,300, up 26.6 percent."
It would have taken a lot of petty crime to amount to that $12K per year in inflation-adjusted (i.e. real) increase.
But you seem to be condoning that preference, and that preference is ridiculous. An economic boom should not be a bad thing. And tech is not raising rents, it is raising housing demand which could easily be met with a corresponding rise in supply that would limit the price increases, but new housing has been being actively blocked for decades.
You also leave out an important factor, most of the city that is supporting the policies that enable petty crime here have no skin in the game. They live in nice neighborhoods where they've owned their houses for decades making them massively wealthy and don't have to interact with the undesirables. It's easy to look the other way and ignore the downtown problems of homelessness and street crime, and to be so woke that you don't want any crime prosecuted, when it doesn't affect you.
A minority of people can afford living in an expensive and safe area.
The majority is forced to choose less expensive, even if less safe, areas.
Our economy is cyclical, so is the technology industry, and so is the technology industry within the Bay Area. It seems to me a large cohort of the HN community has reached an age where they'd typically move to suburbs, "back home", or just to cheaper areas to raise a family. This was hastened by COVID, and yet, the next cohort of new grads is right around the corner, just like it is every year. Is the calculus about where to live different? Slightly, now you pick from 10 metros instead of 5. Are people going to be full time remote? Yes. Can they live anywhere? Certainly. Will new grads be better of starting out in an office just like most people here did? Certainly yes.
Can we recognize for a moment that the collective value of the technology sector located along the West Coast is probably north of $10T? If anything, the tech industry is annexing new metros, not moving to them, as tech continues to eat the world.
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