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How Silicon Valley's Tech Reign Will End
theodp writes "Silicon Valley's stranglehold on West Coast innovation is in danger. The main problem? It's no fun to live in Silicon Valley. Technology is people, explains The Atlantic's Derek Thompson, and more people are choosing to live in cities. And Silicon Valley isn't like a city, it's like a suburb. 'What's happening now,' says author Bruce Katz, 'is workers want to be in Oakland and San Francisco.' So, how might Silicon Valley save itself? 'Silicon Valley is going to have to urbanize,' Katz said. '[There is a] migration out of Silicon Valley to places where people really want to live.'"
>And introverts don't necessarily love the bustle of the city.
Have you been to silicon valley? There's plenty of bustle, just with worse traffic and no good restaurants.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
And SF or Oakland has less traffic and bustle?
BTW, Oakland? Really, Oakland? Most of Oakland doesn't want to live in Oakland.
Yes, it is incredibly boring, AND it is ridiculously expensive. It's not just a problem with "Silicon Valley" - tech money is slowly destroying the entire Bay Area, by destroying the ability of non-tech millionaires to live normal lives. It's starting in Berkeley. :-(
The cost of living is insane out there. There are great engineers all over the world.
I work at a major silicon valley company, and haven't met a single person who wants to live in Oakland. No matter how "hip" it is, the violent crime rate is 4x that of San Jose (the largest suburban city in Silicon Valley).
Source : http://best-cities.findthebest.com/compare/196-246/Oakland-vs-San-Jose
Plenty of techies do live in SF and commute to Silicon Valley companies every day. But SF isn't a city you want to raise kids in - the only people I know with children in SF are either too poor to move, or so incredibly rich that they can send their kids to private schools.
I have to think there is something more going on then lack of entertainment. Furthermore, married couples tend to prefer suburban settings.
Consider that the solution here is getting your engineers dates. If they marry then demographically they'll be inclined to stay and even avoid the city.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
DINKs (Dual Income No Kids) is what it takes to live in SF financially for most people. There are only two main groups that comprise of DINKs. The young, and the gay. Not a criticism. Just stating an economic fact. For everyone else, you have to be upper-middle class or higher.
Life is not for the lazy.
Past favorites include cost of living, housing prices, traffic, taxes, tech bust, tech boom, blah blah blah. Silicon Valley isn't going anywhere and neither are the vast majority of startups.
Cost of living.
I'm telling you right now, after living outside the Bay Area for a few years.
There is NOTHING Silicon Valley has to offer except nostalgia of its past.
Today, we have zero land to develop on.
The city I am from, Mountain View, is in constant process to build these god awful HOA town homes, stacked one on top of the other. you might think its a wonderful place to be, and surely the weather has everything going for it.
But that's it.
The glory days are gone.
What is coming next is the city sprawl, you can count on it.
My family came out here to grow orchards back in the early 1920's, mostly Apricots and Almonds.
These are non existent today.
You can find the same quality of living with just as much cultural activity in many other places across the US.
And most importantly, the cost of living is far cheaper virtually everywhere else.
Seriously.
This place has become more of a status symbol for those who live and work out here than anything else.
There is also a growing divide amongst the wealthy and the living paycheck to paycheck classes in the Bay Area as well.
People are really wasting their money and time out here and they don't even know it.
They're missing the point imho entirely.
I'll be leaving again soon, this time I intend for good.
I'll miss Santa Cruz and The coast line and hills more than anything else.
But I know, there are plenty of those places left unspoiled all across the coast.
just my 2 cents.
So yes, there is a group of tech workers, frequently referred to as "hipsters" that want to live in the urban areas and do their hipster things. However, if you are a tech work with kids, which is actually the majority, you don't want to live in these crime-ridden, urine-scented, no-parking-available urban areas with bad school systems. The pattern I see is that one these hipsters get married and start popping out kids, they move to what people think of as the suburbs. But, they don't necessarily stop being tech workers. And I don't know why TFA says Mountain View isn't having a construction boom. I can count 2 new office buildings and 3 new housing complexes being constructed in its downtown area.
Austin is super cool and fun and way cheaper than SF or Oakland. Austin sort of has a unique mix of SF - Berkeley - Boston - Washington DC in one.
Some people like San Francisco.
Others find it to be a crowded dirty place that smells like urine.
Nobody wants to live in Oakland.
Cheaper, better, faster. You can only pick two.
You can only live in the core urban city if you're wealthy. Being urban education is an abject joke, you live their with children knowing full well you'll be spending over 10 grand a year on private education for them.
The outer ring around the urban center is mainly lower-middle class to poor. These are the children that go to the urban public schools.
The second outer ring is primarily the sub-burbs. Typically 40 to 80 miles out from the core. The people that live here are solid middle class. Their children go to public schools that rate anywhere from fair to very good.
So in summary starting from the center urban city on out ranks as the following group of people. Wealthy - Poor - Middle class. In that order.
Life is not for the lazy.
Inelegantly worded, and I wouldn't go quite that far, but I tend to agree with your dislike of the city life in general.
Full disclosure: I live in the Silicon Valley.
I can't imagine the allure of places like San Francisco. They're dirty, overcrowded, and getting around requires insane amounts of walking because you're never going to find a place to park and you're taking your life in your hands if you actually drive up there. Half the places you want to walk, you're constantly being hit up by people begging for money (despite an ever-increasing homeless services budget—homeless are drawn to SF by the availability of those services, so the more they spend, the more homeless they get; you can't solve homelessness one city at a time—it must be fixed at the national level—but I digress). There are drugged out people lying in the streets. There are drug deals going down on the corner, and prostitutes drumming up business. And for this, people pay more to rent a small apartment than I pay in space rent for an 1800 square foot mobile home. Seriously, what the f***?
I know some people like the "hip" culture of bars and clubs in larger cities, but once those people get a few years older, the desire to go clubbing usually wears off, and they find themselves wanting to live somewhere safe and comfortable. Cities are not that sort of place. The young workers who still haven't figured that out can live in their San Francisco. That's the thing about the Silicon Valley: It's an easy commute from there. Companies that want to attract those young workers would do well to follow the lead of companies like Apple and Google, who provide buses down from the city, where workers can get work done while they commute.
As for the companies that decide to move to San Francisco, it's only a matter of time before they figure out that they need a balance between the young workers and their older, wiser elders, most of whom don't want to move to a city, will be much less willing to commute than their younger counterparts, and will be much less able to commute on commute buses because they are spread over a larger geographical area. It's easy to set up commute buses from a highly populated area to your campus in the suburbs. It's much harder to set up commute buses from the suburbs to a company in the city.
In short, the entire notion of this article is fundamentally founded in a false dichotomy and an incorrect assumption that everyone likes cities. Oh, and one final point: Anyone who says that "Workers want to be in Oakland" is probably holding on to real estate in that city that they can't sell because of Oakland having one of the highest violent crime rates of any city in this country. As far as I can tell, nobody wants to be in Oakland.... :-)
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It's too f-ing expensive.
Almost requires an IPO or your startup to be bought to buy a home in a decent location around here. I guess that's the benefit of telecommuting. You can live way down in Gilroy and VPN into your company located in Palo Alto without having to drive for 2 hours.
"Starter homes" around here which I'd say is a 1500sq ft with almost no land 10ft from your side walls to your neighbors' and your house is 20ft from the back property line), costs $500k and up. Want to live in a district with good schools? Take that same 40 year old house and crank up the price to a cool million. Oh and you'll need to put in about $50-75k worth of upgrades to replace that cracking wood shingle roof, worn out carpets and pipes that have been moving hard water for 40 years. That's ok for the seller because they know someone will move in to put their kids into the top schools around here. Oh don't forget the $15k worth of property taxes each year and potentially $400/month in HOA fees.
Housing prices are now higher than during the bubble, dot-com or housing bubble. It didn't help that all the sellers sat on their homes in the hopes that some Facebook millionaire would want to buy their house.
I live in the silicon valley and can't wait for the day to sell my home and move to another part of the country and pay for a 3k sq ft home for $500k with an acre of land on a lake.
Silicon Valley, like NYC but spread out and requires a car.
Yeah, the food is good except when they put cilantro on everything.
AAAAHAHAHA!! San Jose is a hole and if you lived in the Bay Area long enough you would understand why. BTW, San Jose pretty much is Silicon Valley. Those suburbs are the suburbs of San Jose.
Yeah, the food is good except when they put cilantro on everything.
C'mon, the food in Alviso isn't that bad. Now the Mexican restaurants that try to be hip rather than serving Mexican food made by Mexicans in a restaurant owned by Mexicans, yeah that stuff sucks.
The cost of living is insane out there. There are great engineers all over the world.
What is going to kill Silicon Valley is their pathological need to have the "best and brightest", the "stars", and the "super geniuses" - all to make yet another social networking website or app or yet another push advertising app.
When I see a tech entrepreneur whine and complain how she can't get enough qualified people - like JavaScript engineers - and claims that there are only 25 people in the World who can what she needs to be done in JavaScript, they're headed for a downfall.
Silicon Valley lost its creativity and innovation. Many of the creative folks have gone back home - like back to India and left the Steve Jobs wannabees.
San Francisco is not as "fun" as it used to be. Higher rents drove the artists out a decade ago. SF has about 8,000 homeless people, out of a population of only 750,000. Most of the bookstores have closed. The nightclub scene is slowly being crushed by gentrification.
The financial district is struggling to stay relevant. The big SF banks either tanked or merged with banks elsewhere.
From SF to Silicon Valley and vice versa. Also from Alameda County where houses are a little bit cheaper (looking for a place with many new developments? Come to Dublin right now). The only real problem of the Bay Area (not only Silicon Valley) is the housing price. If you are in high-tech/computer related industries there so many jobs and opportunities, that is why people are here. You want to be where the jobs are, even when most of your income spent on housing. At least if the housing market keeps up with the inflation rate, you are not losing money.
Ever been to Shenzhen?
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
That pretty much applies to all larger international cities these days. They have become no-go zones for young, professional families with children. I turned down a job offer for an engineering management position in Munich and took a lower-paying job in a smaller city where home ownership is much more affordable. Having four children was probably the biggest factor in my decision, as it's next to impossible to rent an apartment in Germany if you have children, especially four.
Have you been to silicon valley? There's plenty of bustle, just with worse traffic and no good restaurants.
Sure, but the traffic has always been bad, and there has never been good restaurants. If this is what it takes to "kill" Silicon Valley, then Silicon Valley would have never existed in the first place. People have been regularly predicting the death of SV since the 1970s.
I live in SV (San Jose, to be exact). The weather is great. My kids go to public schools that are in America's top 1%. The restaurants aren't as good as in SF, but they aren't that bad. Workwise, there is plenty of talent, and it is easy to find people with almost any skill I need. If I get sick of my job, I can walk across the street and find another. Very few other locations has all these benefits.
I love living in San Jose. On the rare occation I want to do something in a big city, I can drive or take a 1 hour train ride to san franciso. I'm not sure why anyone would want to live in Oakland...
I'm not sure why another posted was complaining about restaurants in SJ, or the South Bay in general. There are both great little hole in the wall places, and some good proper restaunts too. I definitely can find better Pho in east San Jose than I can find anywhere in SF (I've looked). South Bay restaurants have the additional advantage that none (to my experience) are pretenious, and unfortunately I wish I could say the same about my experiences with SF restaurants.
I think living in "the City" is for younger people. The rent is only a bit more than the south bay, and the commute is do able. Plus there are plenty of good jobs in SF, and more being added all the time. (although not in my industry, all the silicon is still in Silicon Valley, even if the software and web media is moving up the pennisula)
Most of the lesbians are living in the South Bay and East Bay. It's painful for them down here though, because the commute to the Giants or A's stadiums is so long.
People in California seem to think that everyone else has this burning desire to live in California.
We don't.
Attending church has never been what you've described, and that was true even in the great Theocratic state of Utah.
I'll take my small rural town in the Midwest.
Cities are great for those who like them, but they seem an endless expanse of concrete canyons and people to me. (Yes, I've lived there.)
Like many others, I suspect that it's the younger types that are more up for central city life. When they have a family, more opt for the burbs or even farther out in the rural to quasi rural areas. This isn't very surprising as their needs have changed.
One item that's lacking here is good mass transit. For those who can afford cars, that's a cost or an inconvenience, but for the young or not so well off that can't, it sorta traps them here in a little burg of 1300.
Strangely enough, mass transit used to be here in the early 1900s. There was an interurban electric train system that linked the small towns to the larger ones. (About 20 miles to each of the two in the area.)
I was out there a few times. I loved where BeOS had their headquarters. There was a little complex of houses just across the street so that you could walk down a tree lined street and cross one street to the office. Of course those homes, though only 2 bedroom, probably cost a million or so back in the 90s. Guess you can't have everything.
Try, "can afford to live in silly valley". Six figures is minimum wage there. I interviewed for a job in Pittsburgh. The more I looked at it the more I liked it. I would've made more money and paid about $100k less for a good house in a decent neighborhood. In a city home to CMU, University of Pittsburgh, Biotech companies, and regional energy companies. And brew pubs.
If you want a good standard of living, go east.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
San Jose is a hole and if you lived in the Bay Area long enough you would understand why. BTW, San Jose pretty much is Silicon Valley. Those suburbs are the suburbs of San Jose.
I agree and disagree. I've lived in San Jose for three years and moved to Morgan Hill last month. San Jose doesn't have a real downtown (the thing that comes closest is Santana Row), nor anything else that the big cities have (such as decent public transport).
But while SJ claims to be the "capitol" of silicon valley, it is not. Many of the big names are outside of SJ: Apple, Facebook, Twitter etc. Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and Mountain View are full of tech companies, more than SJ. And where SJ does have the tech, it is primarily concentrated in the triangle 101/880/237. This area may be part of SJ as far as geography is concerned, it doesn't even come close to the feel of being in a city.
The one thing that does suck tremendously is the traffic congestion on 101, 280, 880, 238, 85 and 87. Yeah, that's like living in LA.
Oh, and don't get started on Oakland. When you have documentaries named "Gangland Oakland", you know to stay the hell away with your 100k+ tech salary.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Cities are a better way to be alone than the suburbs, if you like that. In fact you can be more anonymous in a city than in a suburb. And there are more things to do by yourself than in a suburb.
And one more very, very important thing: what most people think of an introvert is actually a myth. Being an introvert doesn't always mean wanting to be alone. In fact, most introverts like people too (really!). In general what the reality is, is that for most introverts, being an introvert means that when you need to power back up, de-stress and get centred, you do it by getting some 'me time'... being alone and relaxing, getting time to process/meditate on things you have experienced lately. And yes, you can be alone in a crowd. Extroverts, by the way, relax by interacting with people. People who just don't 'get' other people or don't want to be around them are actually classified as misanthropes... or sometimes having Aspergers syndrome. It doesn't mean introvert. I am a strong introvert. I hate the suburbs and love the city.
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I'm not sure this writer has been to silicon valley in the last 10 years. There are "walkable, urban" spaces all over the place. The problem is that they're crazy expensive.
The valley is not full of the sleepy suburban areas from 30 years ago. There's a significant amount of high density housing, hip restaurants and bars. A lot of it looks like what you'd expect to see around a large college campus - cheaply built apartments with "interesting" architecture, gelato, coffee, smoke shops and international cuisine. The single family homes actually in the valley are not an option for anyone you might consider a "worker."
The only still-suburban spaces are squeezed between the urbanizing centers in the valley and the two cities: San Francisco and San Jose. Talking about Oakland as an important city to Silicon Valley is... weird.
I know there are several companies in Oakland, but it seems more like a separate, nearby community than part of Silicon Valley. San Jose is larger in population than both San Francisco and Oakland, but is far more spread out. San Francisco still dominates the local political landscape, but San Jose long ago took over the role of counterbalancing city to SF in regional policy and diversity - Oakland is just another set of SF neighborhoods now.
Wow, an author from the online Atlantic needed a subject and found an intellectual from the Brookings Institute with an opinion on Silicon Valley. Better warn Apple before they spend a gazillion dollars in SV on a spaceship for their 25,000 employees. And Google, eBay, Oracle, HP, SalesForce.com, Microsoft (SV), Lockheed, the incubators, and Stanford need to get the memo... their 250,000 jobs will be in San Francisco and Oakland soon! And San Francisco better start building schools for their children..(BTW, S.F. is the largest school district in the country with a shrinking enrollment... the re-gentrification is raising prices so much that working and middle class are moving out.) These companies and the university create the spin-offs that attract the VC and the talent pool can't (and wouldn't) just up and move to Oakland, or Austin, or Chicago. The author mistakes regular seepage from Silicon Valley for a mass migration. Of course there are other opportunities and locales near S.V. and around the country, but for a long time the S.V. tech star will continue to have critical mass and to suck the majority of the VC funding into its orbit.
Every few years some academic looks at a growth spurt (like Pixar, Leap Frog and IKEA in a small town like Emeryville) and makes social and economic forecasts that can't be implemented in the real world. Then journalists assume that their academic degree validates the theory - and write these silly puff pieces.
How about next time we Spare the Electrons!
they put cilantro on everything
I guess it sucks if you don't like it. It is everywhere. Personally I love it, although a lot of people think it tastes like soap. They should have a cilantro free side of the menu or something. Maybe a new restaurant, "Cilantro Optional".
The points the author notices are effects; not causes.
... the Valley is no longer egalitarian, the way it was in the 50s and 60s. We have a greater disparity between the rich and the poor than almost any city along the Pacific Coast, and the rich here still love Libertarian chaos... so, real estate prices are too high. Rents are too high. No parks. poor schools. Easily 7000 homeless just in San Jose. Tens of thousands of homes foreclosed over the last seven years. And even with Google Maps; local business are infernally hard to find and ugly when you get there.
In the 1950s, San Jose and its suburbs adopted an urban growth strategy that was essentially no planning strategy at all. They minimized zoning and urban planning, assuming that giving developers the freedom to develop land without much oversight would somehow produce a quality urban environment as a side-effect.
So San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Campbell, Mountain View and Cupertino spread out because developers opted to build where land was cheap. However, city streets were not extended in a sensible way. To run personal errands on Saturday, we had to start driving five miles (and through a dozen stoplights) just to find a grocery store. Three or four other errands could require fifteen to twenty miles. Add traffic and stoplights, and it could take you five hours or more, to run just three local errands.
In addition, cities here allowed commercial property to mix a little too closely with residential property. This raised crime rates, lowered property values, and made everything ugly. No one planned for parks or shopping centers or other public amenities. When shopping centers were finally built, traffic patterns were ghastly. When planners were forced to route freeways through the area; they were routed where the land was cheap; not where they were really needed -- first they cut neighborhoods in half, and then in quarters. Parks were placed, twenty years late, where more land was cheap, or where well-to-do neighborhoods were still located.
All this turned the valley into a happy little piece of Houston, Texas, only with worse freeways.
The good things about Silicon Valley arose from areas that were planned: Stanford. Large Aerospace companies along Bayshore freeway. Aerospace died, but by then, silicon had taken the place of airplanes. Then silicon died. Today, we run on software and business momentum from the old days, but the momentum is formidable.
As bad as all this is, it won't ultimately kill the valley. I think lack of professional creativity and opportunity will finally kill us. Large companies here never did value what the Harvard Business School calls 'disruptive technology.' They do not hire creative problem solvers. Business startup costs used to be low: Today, they are through the roof, and getting higher. Venture Capital has ruled the roost since 1997 or so, they are getting stronger, and they do not value original ideas.
Major companies here are all slowly dying (like they always have -- remember Fairchild Instruments, DEC and Atari?) -- the difference is; that it is much, much harder to start a new company here than it used to be -- and new companies are where the big companies come from when the old companies finally die.
tt77
Oh, and don't get started on Oakland. When you have documentaries named "Gangland Oakland", you know to stay the hell away with your 100k+ tech salary.
Except for the fact that if you were in the market for a very nice home with very nice views with friendly neighbors, you would probably choose Oakland over San Jose.
Oakland, +1
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
The tension created by "City vs. Suburbs" is strictly for the benefit of the story. Existing companies are opening new offices in urban areas but for the most part they aren't closing offices in the suburbs. Sure, new companies are often starting in cities but they will likely open suburban offices if they survive long enough. It's a healthy kind of diversification that will likely reach some sort of equilibrium over the next decade or two. Does that mean the stature of suburbs will decrease a bit while that of cities increases? Sure, but talk of "winners" and "losers" in some binary or zero-sum sense is overblown.
Small cities aren't too much of a problem (~ 500,000 people) . Usually, you could always find somewhere to rent or own within four blocks, or within a bus-ride to downtown. And there aren't any wild-eyed drunk hobos crashed out on the streets either. Maybe a few homeless people selling "The Big Issue" and chuggers (charity muggers) trying get cash off you. And everywhere is within walking distance; doctor, dentist, stores, shopping malls. Large rows of apartments give you considerable anonymity.
It's the larger cities with the need for a 1+ hour commute by train or tube that are the most intimidating. Particularly having to squash up in tube carriages during rush hour because the central core is too expensive, and the inner suburbs are too dangerous. Otherwise they are more like twenty small cities grown into each other.
Silicon Valley is more like thirty downtown cores all connected by a train network, with each station have bus-routes as spurs. You can get from one city to another 10 miles away in 15 minutes by train. But it takes you an hour to get from one side of the city to downtown by bus. Even longer if you try and take a bus across cities. With somewhere like Sunnyvale, then everything is at least a mile to three miles away from where you are (shopping mall, supermarket, dentist, doctor). Trying to use public transport to get anywhere was like trying to plan a deep space probe mission. There were public transport routes that would take you one place to another, but trying to determine when and where they met up was the hard part. Sometime the map would should the two routes intersecting, but you find that they are opposite side of the street (an eight-lane expressway), with the overpass half a mile away on each side. Or there is a 1-hour wait as one service stops and leaves minutes before the other one. Almost done as if on purpose.
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London is like that too.
I have. It sucks. It's not actually a city, it's more like a long series of 80s era malls which have been reworked to house Trader Joes and suchlike.
The grocery stores are like, C- grade, the place is sprawled out all over and the downtown, which is largely irrelevant to what's know as Silicon Valley- Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, is unremarkable , dull and smallish. The housing it of course through the roof in price while being only mediocre , find-it-anywhere 80s and 90s style apartments.
The houses are just ordinary ranch houses albeit with 750k price tags. really, the whole place was better, just *better* before Fairchild Semi-conductor started it on the path that is now Silicon Valley.
I was only too happy to get out of there. Nearly any place whose name you know, SF, Portland, Austin, etc has more to offer someone looking for something to do on a weekend never mind NY NY or Boston or San Diego or even Kansas City has more to offer young, single people ...
Maybe it has great grade schools...
A real city with real people that's doing cutting edge tech not just a bunch of expensive suburbs like the valley, Fantastic cheap place to be.
You have to be nutters to live in SF.
Or fruits.
Ezekiel 23:20
Ummmmm... nah, too easy.
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s/country/planet/
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Last time I was there I saw a bum drop trou and shit on the sidewalk.
sigs are for fags
'introverts' have generally been pushed out of that culture already. It is harder and harder to be an introvert in tech, esp at the trendy companies. The people they are hiring today probably would not have been programmers 20 years ago.
Have you been to a big city? Palo Alto/Mountain View/Cupertino are like small towns in terms of level of bustle. Sure they have big roads, but they are generally otherwise pretty quiet places.
... is like saying "because larger containers hold more water".
You seem to be implying that it's only the naive young kids who want to live in San Francisco, and the older wiser folks are the only ones smart enough to make the decision to live in the suburbs. Maybe you prefer the suburbs, and that's fine, but here's why your younger coworkers prefer San Francisco:
The problem with suburbs in general, and Silicon Valley in particular, is that suburbs don't scale. This wasn't as much of a problem for previous generations, but these days Silicon Valley has grown to a point where it is. The traffic along highway 101 is terrible and is not easy to avoid. Caltrain doesn't go everywhere and the connecting buses are slow and poorly timed. The place is too sparse to get by without a car, so you absolutely have to get one. On the other hand, San Francisco has good public transport within the city (although not so much out of it heading into the valley). And that's only if you need it - it's also the second most walkable city in the country after New York. I think cars were once viewed as a symbol of freedom to previous generations, but these days they are seen as a ball and chain which ironically ends up limiting your mobility.
Also you may disagree with this, but to me it's also a much more pleasant environment - the Victorian housing, the city skyline, the parks and the waterfront along the Embarcadero and the Marina look beautiful compared to the suburban houses, office parks, shopping plazas and the freeways that connect them.
And as for crime and homelessness, if you exclude the bad neighbourhoods (Tenderloin, the dodgy part of SoMa west of 6th and the dodgy part of the Mission east of Valencia), then there's really not a lot of it. There are also an idea that, despite perceptions, the extra driving that comes with living in the suburbs is more dangerous than the crime in the city.
The article is not great, but it's more based around the idea that there is a generational trend towards urban living. It's wrong to think of it as either "everyone wants to live in the suburbs" or "everyone wants to live in the city", but when compared to previous generations more of Generation Y prefers city living.
And introverts don't necessarily love the bustle of the city.
Don't count on it. It's actually easier to ignore crowds than it is to ignore individuals. An introvert (speaking as a die-hard card-carrying member) isn't necessarily a person who's afraid of people. We just don't get our jollies by dealing with people.
There are tons of good restaurants in Silicon Valley. My favorite Korean soup place is in central Palo Alto. Fabulous Indian food. Sure, there's good food in Oakland and San Francisco, but it's population density and services that make those locations more desirable, not food. And really, neither San Francisco nor Oakland are particularly urban anyway—they're just _more_ urban than Silicon Valley.
As long as you don't mind living in an oppressive Communist nation.
We're working on it. We're certainly well down the spying-on-citizens part.
There is lots of crime in cities, but there is also a lot of people in cities, so the amount of crime per person present in the city at any time (many of who sleep in the suburbs/exburbs) is not particularly high. If you factor in that most of the crimes that happen in cities are crimes where the victim is either a criminal themself or a person from the underclass, often a sex worker or a drug addict (or both), cities begin to seem like rather safe places for most people. Just watch out for pickpockets.
Oakland is a big city (in terms of area, not population). There are _really_ nice neighborhoods, and it has a decent downtown. Great Chinatown. The gang thing will get less prevalent over time if Silicon Valley really does move there. If I had to choose where in the Bay Area to live, Oakland would be high on the list. For one thing, they have public transportation, unlike Silicon Valley.
At least the US hasn't run over any peacefully demonstrating citizens with tanks.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
What, and Silicon Valley is an economical place to live? HAH! Try buying a house in Palo Alto, Mountain View or Sunnyvale and then get back to me about how cheap it is to live there.
It may be that SF is more expensive than the valley now, but it hasn't been that way historically, and that's _certainly_ not true of Oakland. Oakland is much cheaper than the valley, has better public transportation, as good food, less traffic, and better views. And you're closer to the east bay hills, which are fantastic for recreation, and closer to Yosemite, and I could go on and on...
The Shark Tank has certainly done the opposite to that area of San Jose. Lower crime and increased property values. It's one of the reasons why Santa Clara wanted the stadium
Anecdotally a friend of mine turned down a pretty damn good offer from a nice company in the area due to the place being "a giant sterile Starbucks wasteland".
He loved San Fran though.
Don't go anywhere near golden gate park after dark. Unless you are Chuck Norris in a hazmat suit or there is a free concert going on.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
...but here in the Pittsburgh PA area, the suburbs are only a few miles from Downtown. We do have upper middle-class areas within the city, but the vast majority of the population would rather live in a suburb to avoid the crowds and crime that bleeds out of the poor areas and their associated gang issues. My house is 15 miles from downtown, across the street from a golf course, costs me 775/mo in rent. You can't rent a shoebox in SF for that much.
Really, tech is going to move away from areas like Silicon Valley, the Bay area, etc. in favor of smaller cities across the country. Collaberation via the Internet makes it possible to group smart people regardless of geography - and cost of living DOES matter. Especially once you go past 30 years old and care less about the club scene and more about what you get for your money. And it is a good deal for employers to hire someone at 60k in Pittsburgh that they would have to pay 120k in CA - and the employee can have a higher standard of living too.
Actually, Stanford pretty much is Silicon Valley. San Jose is where they send you if you behave badly.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
SF doesn't have decent public transit either. All it has is a pathetically limited number of light rail lines and buses. Unless you're on the "corridor" it's a sardine tin like bus commute for you, that averages to be twice as fast as walking.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I loved where BeOS had their headquarters.
Fat lot of good that did them.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I spent 21 years in the Valley, doing 4 startups and then 8 years in venture capital. It was great, and I couldn't have had the same opportunities anywhere else.
But I got sick of it, and moved right at the end of 2011 (hint: don't have a moving truck drive across the US between Xmas and the end of the year...it freezes itself and all of your stuff) to North Carolina, in the Research Triangle Park area. The Bay Area's crowding, expense and divided society issues began to bug me more and more.
So now I can compare the world's leading tech area with another tech area, way lower on the totem pole.
The cost of living is much lower and the quality of life is much higher in NC for most people. Housing, at almost every level, is one sixth the price of the Bay Area. Average household incomes are about the same (yes, really, about the same....most people in the Valley aren't rich), but a regular family making $50k per year can afford a 2,000 sq ft house on a quarter of an acre in NC. Everything costs less in NC, e.g. my garbage is $16/month instead of $50, water is $21 instead of $100, sales taxes are about 3 points lower, so everything benefits from that, and gas/utilities/groceries are all noticeably lower. Healthcare is great in both places if you have good insurance. Public schools are, overall, better in NC. There are very good local colleges, and there are more PhDs per capita than anywhere else in the US. You don't have Stanford and Berkeley, of course, but you have Duke, UNC Chapel Hill and NC State; I'm really impressed with what comes out of those schools in terms of people and tech.
The weather in NC sucks in July and August; I personally find it too hot and humid. But that's what A/C is for. The rest of the year you have seasons. The Valley has better weather.
BUT BUT BUT.....nothing compares to Silicon Valley for the combination of vast amounts of (venture) capital, vast numbers of experienced tech people, including startup execs, a ton of tech startup infrastructure and a very fluid job market. The RTP area is chock full of startups, with more in the "we make stuff -- chips, materials, devices" category. Capital is much harder to find. There are good banks and lawyers and other services that startups need. Developers flood out of the local schools, but not all stay here. You can pay a developer much less than in the Valley, and (s)he can actually live on the salary (as you can rent a decent HOUSE for $1200, and buy a starter home for $130k).
I've seen multiple attempts worldwide to duplicate Silicon Valley. If I had about $500B and 30 years (I'm a little short of the former, and hope to make the latter), I could replicate the Valley, maybe. But I doubt it. The Valley pioneers were amazing people; check out the documentaries on the subject. They had perfect timing. It's hard to see the same confluence of events happening again, at least in tech.
Silicon Valley is more like thirty downtown cores all connected by a train network...
"Network"? Ha ha, that's a good one. More like a conveyor belt with rusty rollers.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Oh, and don't get started on Oakland. When you have documentaries named "Gangland Oakland", you know to stay the hell away with your 100k+ tech salary.
What exactly do you have against Oakland, other than the massive amount of industrial pollution, drug manufacturing, gang shooting, and having your $6000 entertainment system, which your $100K salary allows you to afford, stolen once a week, the windows busted out on your BMW, and taggers deciding your car and house are great places to express themselves, you know, when they aren't too busy doing other things, like mugging you?
PS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attractions_in_Silicon_Valley
PPS: Google alone has 32 restaurants on campus, most of which are managed by the same people who used to go out on tour and cook for The Grateful Dead.
I can I haz ur house?
Unless some other land mass rises out of the Pacific ocean, the regions of coastal California between Marin and San Diego counties will always be the most desirable (expensive) in the country because it is the only part of the country with temperate weather year round.
For all practical purposes, San Francisco is part of Silicon Valley. Sure, originally it meant a small cluster of towns in Santa Clara county, but today Silicon Valley really includes everything surrounding the southern arm of San Francisco Bay. There are lots of people who live in San Francisco and work in Palo Alto. You just can't divide it up any more.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
The suburbs scale just fine. You do have to choose employment within a reasonable distance or move. You can arbitrarily extend suburbia out for hundreds of miles in every direction. Just look at almost the entire northeastern seaboard for proof of this. The only reason the suburbs can't spread quite as well in the Silicon Valley area is because there are too many mountains. Even still, there's no fundamental reason that it can't expand out in directions where it is feasible to do so.
The South Bay traffic problems would be significantly reduced if we eliminated Prop 13. Under Prop 13, a home's value is reevaluated only when the owner sells it (for the most part). As a result, homeowners who change jobs are forced to commute because selling their homes and buying otherwise identical homes closer to work would result in a huge property tax increase.
That said, for the most part, I've found 101's traffic easy to avoid. Highway 280 parallels it just a few miles away, and usually has fewer problems. And in the South Bay, 85 is frequently a better choice than either one. The only time I've been unable to avoid bad traffic on 101 is when I'm going down towards Salinas, and that stretch is only bad because A. the road desperately needs to be eight lanes all the way to Salinas, B. SR-156 needs to be widened to four lanes all the way to Castroville (greater Monterey), and C. there is no good parallel route beyond where 280 and 85 merge into 101 other than taking 17 down to Santa Cruz and going across Highway 1 (which always has serious traffic problems because it also needs to be 4+ lanes all the way to Monterey).
Attractiveness, perhaps, though that varies widely, depending on where you are, both in the city and in the suburbs. Functionality-wise, definitely not. In my standalone house, I can play my grand piano at 2 a.m. without the neighbors calling the police. In a multi-family dwelling, that would almost never be the case, because properly soundproofing the walls between two units dramatically increases the cost of construction. I can build a house that (assuming no HOA rules) looks like what I want it to look like, without the design decisions being limited by trying to cram square footage onto a postage stamp, resulting in hard-to-use three- and four-story buildings that use space inefficiently. There are large parks with actual trees and lakes. The schools are better (which isn't important until you have kids, but give it time). And so on.
The problem with that assertion is that youth have always had a strong preference to city living. The author is suggesting that this is somehow new, but it isn't. That was true even forty or fifty years ago. On the average, that preference starts to change when people have their first kid, and people tend to strongly prefer the suburbs by the time their first kid reaches school age. I see no evidence that the pattern is changing significantly, notwithstanding people choosing to have kids a bit later in life than they used to.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Of course, the trouble is that the people deciding where to put the offices are listening to idiots like the GP instead of you, so us folks who like the city and prefer not to drive end up having a stupid car commute anyway because we have to go out to the suburban wasteland to find a job!
(I live 4 miles from downtown Atlanta, but most jobs in my industry are 30 miles out in the exurbs -- and not in the same direction, either, so you can't even pick an exurb to live in because if you change jobs you're screwed anyway. It's a pain in the ass.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
they put cilantro on everything
I guess it sucks if you don't like it. It is everywhere. Personally I love it, although a lot of people think it tastes like soap. They should have a cilantro free side of the menu or something. Maybe a new restaurant, "Cilantro Optional".
Interestingly enough, the cilantro quale is genetic. Cf.
Love To Hate Cilantro? It's In Your Genes And Maybe, In Your Head
It's just another allele, similar in concept to the one that causes certain people to have the inability to smell cyanide. I have certainly tested my cilantro sensory interpretation, but I hesitate to test cyanide.
I used to live in Tamalpais Valley in the Bay Area, paying $900/month for a single room in a house, this was in 1996. Things have gotten astronomically worse from what I hear from my friends. Heck, a pair of friends dropped $300k on a crappy little house in the canal district of San Rafael that year as well. I didn't tell them this, but it was a sh**hole! Things are just insane out there.
While I have a very nice $500k house now in the South-East, and the cost of living is great, I don't think you're going to be finding any decent lake property for $500k with a house on it without wheels ;).
I think the only way I could afford to live in the Bay Area without living in a dump now would be a live-aboard on a nice boat - the only problem is that getting a live-aboard permit in the Bay Area is supposed to be nigh on impossible (although I'm sure tons of people are doing it illegally.)
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Every startup is hiring brocoders now. They want to live in hip city centres where you can get 15 different nationalities of food on every intersection and live your whole life on foot. Introverts are sooooo 2011.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
And introverts don't necessarily love the bustle of the city.
you can be more introvert in a big city easier than in a town scenario.. in a big city nobody knows anyone they meet on the street but in a small neighborhood everyone knows everyone..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The bay area has one great thing going for it, as I sit in 105 degree heat, its weather. A few days with a little heat, some rain, smog gets blown to other parts of the state. I lived there for many years, Fremont, Saratoga, San Jose, Redwood City. It started to get a little crowded for me so I left but I sure do miss it's weather.
I live in East Bay but work in SoMa. That's pretty much my perfect combination: I get to run around the city during the day but go home to a small town at night. Rents are way cheaper here, too, perhaps by half.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
They're dirty, overcrowded, and getting around requires insane amounts of walking because you're never going to find a place to park and you're taking your life in your hands if you actually drive up there.
Who the hell drives in SF? I take a transbay bus to and from work because it's cheaper than paying the bridge toll, I don't have to pay for parking, and I can play with my iPad for half an hour while someone else drives. Once in the city, there are a lot of really good iPhone apps for getting from point A to point B via public transit as easily as possible.
I had never not owned a car from the time I turned 16 to right after I moved here, but almost immediately sold mine once I figured out the transit system. We kept my wife's minivan for tearing about East Bay but almost never drive it into the city because there's just no need to.
Half the places you want to walk, you're constantly being hit up by people begging for money
Then choose not to walk in the Tenderloin. You still see the random homeless in SoMa and Financial District, sure, but they leave you alone.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
To predict what will kill Silicon Valley you will have to understand what created it in the first place. And it's not what you mention.
I haven't digged into it myself but if anything I would guess it was a combination of the two of the best technology universities plus the very mild weather and the cheap land in the area.
The universities are very good, but that's hardly unique. Think MIT, CalTech, Carnegie-Mellon, Princeton, Champaign-Urbana, etc. In fact while both Stanford and UC Berkeley have always been good, they've attained much of their current status because of SV. I'm sure the weather didn't hurt, but many tech hubs like Boston aren't known for their idyllic weather. For that matter SoCal has more idyllic weather, especially San Diego. The cheap land was hardly unique.
The only plausible explanation I know of is Bill Shockley's mother lived there.
Add to this all the venture capitalists that gathered in the area
The VC's are there because it's SV, not the other way around.
The Grateful Dead guy is long gone.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
For a few months I am consulting in San Jose and driving from Berkeley. I can't wait for all of those folks to move to the cities and get off the roads! Typical commute is 1.5 hours to drive no more than 49 miles. Even getting on the road at 6 AM doesn't beat the traffic.
I really wonder what the average anti-public-transport folks are thinking - if people who want good public transport (just gimme a train from south bay to tri-valley) got what they want, the bus/train riders would leave the roads freeing them up for folks who do want to commute.
Corrupt politics is the root (or most visible symptom) of all the major problems our state/country faces.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
'introverts' have generally been pushed out of that culture already. It is harder and harder to be an introvert in tech, esp at the trendy companies. The people they are hiring today probably would not have been programmers 20 years ago.
And they aren't programmers now, they're script monkeys.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Edwardian, not Victorian.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Almost requires an IPO or your startup to be bought to buy a home in a decent location around here
It takes more than an IPO to buy a nice home in Silicon Valley. I know. $200 a share still isn't enough.
I live in the silicon valley and can't wait for the day to sell my home and move to another part of the country and pay for a 3k sq ft home for $500k with an acre of land on a lake.
I've been considering Seattle. It is just so damn depressing how expensive it is to buy a house.
They love cilantro in Tex-Mex too, FWIW. I hate the stuff, it tastes rancid to me. Basically any chunk large enough to see (more than say 1mm in any direction, and any stem piece) is too much. I always have to remember to ask for refried beans at Taco Cabana, and avoid the bits of cilantro that fall into the jalapenos in the condiments bar. Pico de gallo is right out.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The OP takes 90 minutes to do 49 miles, driving. I take public transit, and it takes me 60 minutes... to do 15 miles. And this is in the NYC area, which supposedly has the best public transit in the US. Public transit isn't an answer.
Anyway, I think the city thing doesn't have all that long to run. The bulge of the millennial generation is getting older (and city schools haven't gotten any better, by and large -- not all these millennials are forever-virginal slashdotters. Not to mention mass transit seems a lot less appealing when you're trying to drag kids around on it), and city cost of living is getting higher.
for a business space in SF are as cheap as say, Burlingame. Or Santa Clara. Or San Jose. Not. Ever.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The Silicon Valley Leadership Council has in general been for better roads and against mass transit spending. It's the typical business short-term thinking. They don't care what the situation will be in 15 years, just now.
If this is the group you're referring to, then it seems they've been around for 35 years. 35 years of "bigger roads + no mass transit spending" seems to me have resulted in a whole lot of backwards policy - that misguided future seems to be here, and have been here for decades.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
The OP takes 90 minutes to do 49 miles, driving. I take public transit, and it takes me 60 minutes... to do 15 miles.
San Francisco's public transit truthfully sucks in comparison with other cities. When I lived in SF (early 90s-2005), I lived in a relatively quiet neighborhood between the panhandle and USF. I worked first in Sunnyvale, then in Fremont. Getting to either place was a hassle, and a large part of it was due to SF Muni (before I ever set foot in a Caltrain or BART station. I could take the Fulton or Hayes bus, which supposedly would come every 10-15 minutes (much less between runs in the early 90s). The reality was that the buses would stack up for 30-40 minutes, then all show up at once. It would take at least a half an hour to get downtown - a mere 3 miles or so. Once there, Caltrain or BART would be another 50-55 minutes to either Sunnyvale or Fremont. And that is assuming you didn't have someone jump in front of the train or the train didn't break down, or there weren't BART switching problems.
Don't even get me started on SF's taxi situation.
When I moved to Chicago, I thought I was in heaven with their transit and taxi system (and Chicago has PLENTY of transit problems, but nowhere near the amount that SF had for 1/4 of the population.)
You must be taking the slow bus. Metro North can do ~23 miles in ~25 minutes (White Plains to Grand Central).
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
While the group has been arounf for 35 years, it's different people every 5 or so. Whatever CEOs are riding the wave at the moment. They know that any mass transit that we start now is on a longer timeline than their exit strategy.
Bruce Perens.
San Francisco's public transit truthfully sucks in comparison with other cities
Except for LA's. Then, BART and Muni look like a shining example.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
With the exception of New Orleans, public schools in the major US cities generally do quite well. They get a bad rap for having higher dropout rates, but those dropout rates go along with taking in the at-risk low income and troubled children that the public schools are required to admit. If you adjust for that then their graduation rates and college acceptance rates are no lower than with private schools.
This is true for Chicago public schools at least, and I believe true for most public school systems. I say this because I know that the New Orleans public school system in infamous for being the only major metropolitan school system in the country that does worse than charter schools (which are not private, so I'm making an assumption here, but I don't think it's out of line).
Of course, a person can also buck the trend you lay down simply by having no children.
In the information economy we have today, the geographical location of many workers is becoming more and more irrelevant. Smaller communities and even many rural areas have reasonably decent Internet connections which are necessary for remote work. Remote workers have to be more self-motivated since they don't have their bosses of the beehive cubicles breathing down their necks. It is grossly inefficient to move heavy material objects such as people or their cars when those people are mostly dealing with information. The problem is that there are not that many diligent, honest, self-motivated workers these days anymore. Too many people want to get away with as little work as possible. Many bosses also feel that they do not have enough control over their minions if these workers are hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
Most city folks can't even imagine what it is like to live in a place where the nearest neighbor is half a mile or more away. Many city folks have never seen a glorious mountain sunrise or the Milky Way and all the other stars. City dwellers rarely find out what it is like to breathe pure air that has not been contaminated by car exhaust and industrial fumes or drink pure water fed by an underground stream that arises from the melting snow of the surrounding mountains. City children don't learn how to saddle up and then ride a horse, raise a steer or pig, collect fresh eggs from the chicken coop and pick fresh raspberries and blackberries. Our children were raised this way and now our grandchildren are also growing up in an environment where they can learn how to live apart from the rat race of the big city.
I used to live in San Francisco when that was still a nice town and also in Palo Alto working for Stanford University. We gave up all the dubious conveniences of city and suburbia living for the country. With the help of Amazon and other Internet merchants I can have all the high tech toys I could possibly want. Once every month or two we drive 140 miles round-trip to Costco to stock up on items not available locally.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
Have you ever been to the Bay Area? With Oakland, there's some really shitty parts, there's also middle parts, and then some of the most expensive housing in the Bay Area, with excellent schools and no crime.
Oakland is a pit. There are suburbs of Oakland which are not pits, but they are not Oakland, which is kind of the point.
There is a good reason it costs to go over the bay bridge from Oakland into San Francisco, but that it's free to go over the same bay bridge when you are going from San Francisco to Oakland.
I love to go hiking in Oakland's Redwood forests.
I'm pretty sure you meant to say "Clarement/Piedmont/Rock Ridge/Joaquin Miller Park/Redwood Heights" here, rather than saying "Oakland". Which is to say, you meant to say that you are not in Oakland, but in the suburbs, since that's what's actually close to the redwood forests.
Emeryville is rather nice (we held the first BSD Con there, years ago, and Sendmail is located there, but it's a separate place from Oakland. It's mostly where Oakland drives to to get to the Ikea, since Ikea would not be caught dead with a store in Oakland itself.
I suppose you could claim the Oakland airport as an attraction, but everyone pretty much flies into SFO. TheOakland airport exists as a place to divert planes when SFO is being pissy about not being allowed to expand its runways and making planes come in on a single runway because they like to pretend the airport doesn't have a moratorium on planes that do not have a modern high accuracy ILS such that it could be zero visibility, and they'd still be able to take off and land on all runways, even if they painted over the cockpit windows. That's only because people don't want to add the extra hour and a half for the shuttle for the pit which is San Jose Mineta.
PS: It might also have something to do with the only thing the Oakland airport being a Hub for being FedEx Express, which is great if you've FedEx'ed yourself, but otherwise not so nifty for humans. They have ~13 non-hubbed airlines that fly in and out, compared to the ~40 airlines that fly in and out of SFO, which is a hub for both Virgin America and United.
> And introverts don't necessarily love the bustle of the city.
It depends... I'd argue that to introverts, "bustle" is just background noise that's easy to ignore, and maybe vaguely comforting in a passive-social-life kind of way. In contrast, the invasive social bullying you'll encounter in a small town "where everyone knows everybody" is positively soul-crushing. Being left alone when you're one in 4 million is pretty easy. Being left alone when you're one of 137 people living within 20 miles is a bit more challenging, especially if one or more of the 137 takes an invasive & annoying interest in you, or decides you don't neatly conform to their world view.
In a big city, you can buy a townhouse. It might share walls with 2 neighbors, but those walls are probably concrete and (if built within the past 50 years or so) devoid of openings & wall penetrations. If your back yard isn't surrounded by an 8-foot concrete wall, it probably COULD be done legally if you wanted one. Contrast that with typical suburbia, where you might have 12 windows and 10 feet of airspace separating you from your neighbors, and you probably aren't allowed to build anything more substantial than a 6' wall with 8' hedge before the HOA will come after you for creating an "eyesore" or blocking your neighbor's "view" (of your yard). In a city, your neighbors are closer, but you're also allowed to do more effective things to buffer yourself from them.
Narrow townhomes often have three, four, or more stories. Some people hate it, but for others, there's just something totally cool about a zig-zag floor plan where the front rooms are offset by 1/2 floor from the rear rooms & the stairs do double-duty as both stairways and interior hallways. Bonus points if you have a basement room that opens up into a walk-out excavated light court ( http://www.busyboo.com/2013/02/20/home-extension-uk-garden/ ), and official "jackpot" status if your garage has a pit-type hydraulic car stacker like this one (which allows you to independently park two cars in a single-car garage with high ceiling and pit) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3aJjCI0JSE :-D
I'm in Silicon Valley. I want to live in Nevada, far enough from the neighbors that I can't hear their HIFIs in the daytime or see their lights at night.
I want to live in Nevada so much that I built a house there - a few miles over the state line near Lake Topaz. Fully paid for. Marvelous view. Good neighbors. Also rabbits (jack and cottontail), quail, coyotes, deer, antelope, bobcats, cougars, and black bears. Gun laws are a lot different there, and I have a Nevada CCW that's also valid in many other states due to reciprocity (though not in CA).
For the Town House near work I also moved across the bay from Palo Alto. Just off the other end of the bridge, for less than I was paying in rent in Palo, I was able to BUY a two-story four-bedroom with 7,000+square feet of yard and remodel it. 200A electric service (two 20A circuits to each room for starters). Satellite TV and Cat 5E everywhere. (Only running 100M at the moment but I hear that with house-sized runs you can get away with 5e for gigabit Ethernet.) The yard is now a garden and orchard. We get most of our veggies from it - and our eggs. We were also on the Bay Friendly Garden Tour last year.
They tell me the city here on the Back Bay has a gang problem. But for several blocks around our house it doesn't. It's much like in Palo Alto (where the burglars worked their way down Loma Verde street and skipped only two houses - ours and the retired cop two doors down). It seems the crooks don't like to bother NRA instructors, and the wife's "Ducks Unlimited" sticker tells them she can hit a spot the size of a duck (or a human heart) with a shotgun, from 50 yards, even if it is flying at the time. B-)
Of course NV has no such crime issues. Even machine guns are legal there. B-)
Move to a SF or Oakland? By preference? You've GOT to be kidding.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I've got nothing against the bay area. Cool place and I like it. If it suits you then by all means live there and enjoy it. But please don't act like it is the only decent place in the US to live. That's just wrong and frankly kind of offensive.
one thing that keeps me here is the forward thinking attitude. acceptance of different lifestyles (for the most part) and the fact that its NOT required that you participate in a religion. quite a lot of the US insists you belong to the local church and if you don't, you are never accepted by your neighbors. I want no part of that kind of lifestyle and that elimnates about 80% of the US, for me.
You are incorrectly presuming 80% of the US believes something you clearly have no knowledge of and frankly if you want acceptance of your lifestyle it's a good idea to start by accepting those of others. You seem to want others to accept your lifestyle but do not seem willing to return the favor. You want forward thinking attitudes and acceptance of different lifestyles? Come to (almost) any college town. Austin, Ann Arbor, Madison, Ithaca, Evanston, Boulder, Chapel Hill, etc. There are tons of them. You'll find exactly what you are describing. Same thing with a lot of large cities. Get a big enough population together and you'll find plenty of acceptance of anything.
It's pretty clear you haven't lived a lot of different places because you are making assertions not based in actual fact. I've lived on the east coast, in the midwest, bits of the Mississippi valley, and the south. I've also worked as a consultant at one time or another in about 2/3's of the lower 48 states. I have NEVER seen a community where you are "required" to participate in a religion. In fact I've never even been in one where the community gave a crap whether you were religious or not. There probably are exceptions in very specific areas but in 99% of the US no one really cares unless you waive it in their face. Presently I'm living in the Midwest which accounts for about 1/5 of the US population and I assure you that no one here cares what religion you are or aren't any more than they do in San Francisco. I could fairly be described as an atheist (never been to church a day in my life) and I've never felt excluded anywhere, even in places in the so called bible belt where I have a lot of family. I've lived and spent tons of time in places not noted for being "forward thinking" and the problem you describe simply does not exist.
but I keep coming back to the intellectualism of the area. if you are a thinker, you'll fit in well here. no one makes fun of you if you are smart, unlike much of the rest of the country. food selection is as good as it gets here, too; with all the different restaurants and styles of food, its a major reason for me to stay here.
OK, now you are just making shit up. Nothing against the Bay area but it is hardly the only place in the country that has a lot of smart people or good food. I was in Ann Arbor recently and the average person there is ridiculously well educated and the food is as good as anywhere I've ever been. Go to ANY of the college towns and you'll find exactly what you describe. Smart people, good food, progressive attitudes. I can point you to food and restaurants where I live which are the match of anything you'll find in the Bay area and yes I speak from personal experience. It might be a bit different but it is every bit as good.
oh, and the weather. the weather! for a snow-hater like myself, it would be hard to leave the bay area and move back to the snow and cold.
The bay area is pretty temperate compared to lots of places. Austin is an awesome town and the Bay Area is an ice box by comparison. And for the record the snow and cold aren't that bad and can be pretty fun even for someone like me that doesn't like the cold much.
Idaho Falls, Idaho. They don't much hold with all that whacky stuff the liberals down in Pocatello do. Boy, do I wish I were kidding.
So a town of roughly 50,000 somehow is representative of the rest of the US? Curious...
It's too f-ing expensive.
Is this like Yogi Berra's argument that "no one goes there anymore, it's too crowded"? Prices go up because people DO want to live there. They may not be able to but if they didn't want to live there, real estate prices would be falling.
Silicon Valley, like NYC but spread out and requires a car.
Both are fine but Silicon Valley bears little resemblance to NYC beyond absurd real estate prices.
....and Bus tours of the abandoned city and abandoned buildings will start at $200/person. Profit's gon' be had!!!
Unless that big city is New York or San Francisco and you're not filthy rich.
I live in very typical suburban NJ. One end of my house has two small windows, which face the blank wall of my neighbor's garage. In between is my garage, plus maybe 15 feet of my yard, a retaining wall, and about 20 feet of his yard, with a few evergreens and maples in the space. On the other side I have a blank wall (though I could add windows if I wanted to) facing the back of the neighbor's house though a thicket of trees. McMansion-on-a-postage-stamp developments aren't all there is to "typical suburbia", any more than high-rises are all there are to cities.
No HOA, though municipal ordinances could be an issue. Probably not, seeing as one of my neighbors has a 10-foot chain link fence in their front yard. And if you think HOAs are bad (and they are), NYC rules are far worse. The only things worse than that are wetlands and historic district regulations
Here in suburbia we call that a split level.
I suppose I could turn my 2-car into a 4-car with that, but I don't think it's worth the cost.
Except for LA's. Then, BART and Muni look like a shining example.
LA is really a special case, as far as public transit goes. It's *so* spread out. Considering how spread out it is, at least they have bus lines (and a couple trains/light rail) that'll get you downtown or to the airport relatively easy, albeit it not so quickly. Compare it to another equally spread out city like Phoenix and you'll see that the coverage more complete in LA.
I think taking a taxi is LA is also MUCH easier than in SF. At least they'll come when you call them, unlike in SF. That so infuriated me in SF - you'd call for a taxi and one would never arrive.
Yeah, I remember the dot com boom when they put on extra trains to handle the extra demand. Around mid 1990's, hardly anyone used the Caltrain between 9am and 10am. By the peak of the boom, every week saw another person competing for a seat, until there was a scrum of people trying to get on every day. Wasn't helped by Caltrain's policy of roping off the end carriage for school trips, or having direct access to the station from one side only. When they did bring in "new" carriages, these were some old Virginia Express carriages that had fold-up steps. I remember everyone going "OMG!! WTF!!!" when they first saw them.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
And really, neither San Francisco nor Oakland are particularly urban anyway—they're just _more_ urban than Silicon Valley.
I agree that both are more urban than San Jose and it's suburbs and really Oakland isn't that urban, but if you don't think San Francisco is urban you are really limiting your definition. In the US, Manhattan, Chicago, Philly, and MAYBE Boston and downtown Miami are about the only cities more urban than San Francisco.
That was a hit song by Dionne Warwick in the 1960s. It extolled the small-town life of what was then a pretty small place, when the Santa Clara Valley was still agricultural (anyone remember Paul Masson vineyards, the bulk-wine producer just west of town?).
"LA is a great big city, put a hundred down and buy a car."
San Jose was the opposite of LA, the place you went back to when LA got you down.
Now, of course, San Jose is more like LA than any other place in northern California. Bigger than SF or Oakland, and sprawling all over. Suburbs in search of a city.
No wonder I like it here in Boston.
They're almost done with Paula and George, you better lay low for a while.
Or you fly into Oakland and drive in because the flight from PDX-Oakland + Hertz costs less than the flight from PDX-SFO alone. SJC is ok except it's only open between 3 and 4pm on alternating Thursdays in May. I'll fly to SJC if I can get on the corporate jet, but not otherwise.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I agree completely. I have no reason to believe that the forces that make silicon valley silicon valley are about to change. Its about the network effect of diverse techy skills and investors all in the same place with high job mobility.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
That was due to an over-reaction by edgy poorly trained troops. As opposed to on a command from the central leadership.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
sounds like a good description of any working-class neighborhood in Greenwich, CT
resist propaganda
Yay, another thing to maintain and pay for, plus I need a place to store it. Party on! One of the great things about living in a big city is less crap to keep track of.
No, we live in the mountains of southern Oregon.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
The boss of my biotech startup is the smartest guy I know - he located us in Reno. Great weather, great skiing, and no traffic!
Social Credit would solve everything...
And you're not just going to pop out at lunch to hit up that new trendy lunch kiosk or the funky clothing store.
Which is something about 1% of the engineers I have met have any interest in doing at lunch on a workday. Did you RTFA? *Tech Reign*...
Or after work catch a play in a small off-off-Broadway type show that you are intrigued by, that perhaps your coworker is in.
Saw my coworker in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum a few years ago at the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts, actually. I've also gone to a few local premieres of PDI/Dreamworks and Pixar movies via friends who worked on them. And though I live a bit outside of SF now I have been to a bunch of plays and concerts there, of course. Ever hear of the Fillmore?
Nor pop out for your own audition, or to record a voiceover, or to meet your girlfriend/boyfriend (or both!) the dancer at the studio.
And something about 0.01% of the engineers I have met have any interesting in doing...
Or join a group run training for a marathon.
Now that's just silly, group runs are everywhere around here.
I've worked in office parks that were technology hubs in the overall New York Metro but in New Jersey, in the Greater Boston Metro on the Route 128 Corridor, but half-hour or more away, in some cases in another state (eg the failed/killed DEC's real-estate in NH taken over by BigGreenPyramidFinancialCo). In North Carolina's Research Triangle Park, but thus not in Raleigh nor Durham city centers or urban village areas themselves
Ah, I see, you are one of the NYC snobs, where "anything more than 10 miles from Manhattan is the boonies" and can't imagine that anyone could possibly enjoy nature more than wall-to-wall buildings, constant noise pollution, and a dull glow in the sky every night.
Well, I don't see the Bay Area on that list, so I'm not sure why you are talking like you really know what life is like here. I have lived all over the Bay Area, from the city, to the "suburbs", to the hills with a 50-mile view from my back porch. For a few years I even lived in the northern Santa Cruz foothills and commuted 20 miles (which on 280 is about 20 minutes - probably less than many commutes on public transit in NY) into SF.
MANY people (me included) honestly don't want to live in the middle of a city, and it's absurd to pretend many of the "multii-talented multi-intelligenced people" can't think the same way. If you want to be in or around a world-class city, San Francisco is SO much more accessible than New York. No one here thinks "oh my god the city is 20 miles away I can't imagine going that far!" Plus you are 3 hours from world class skiing in Tahoe, 3 hours from Yosemite, an hour from Napa and Sonoma, 1/2 an hour from world class surfing, 1/2 hour from hiking though old growth Redwood/Giant Sequoia forests, probably the some of the best roads for cycling Skyline through the Santa Cruz Mountains, not to mention Monterrey, Big Sur, etc. And, sure, you need a car to get to most those, but who cares? That's kind of the point - to get OUT. I also love to drive cars, and there are some amazing twisty roads in the mountains as well as 2 world-class race tracks (Sears Point and Laguna Seca) within 2 hours where I can track my C2S.
I suppose Californians will never really understand New Yorkers and vice versa. Different lifestyles, but both can be equally valid and fulfilling, and there are PLENTY of people wanting one of the other to keep both regions thriving, as long (in both areas) people can continue to afford living there. I'm not knocking the NY or the city lifestyle, I know lots of people who love it, but I know many more who don't. And many of those who do have still decided to move out once they started raising a family - despite what the media wants you to think, for every 20 year old college dropout starting a company there are dozens of experienced senior engineers (who have done the urban lifestyle and are ready for something else) doing the same (or actually making that 20 year old's idea work).
It's apparently where the hipsters are moving, now that the Mission is full.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
During the 80s I lived in an older town in NJ (still suburbia, and most of the lots were 55' wide but some were 110' wide.) My house there made a nice downpayment on a condo in Silicon Valley when I moved here, but the early 90s were a bit of a real estate slump. I would have gotten an actual house in San Jose instead, but got laid off just before we made an offer, and we could handle the condo on one income.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Downtown Mountain View typically has 25 different cuisines in its 4-block restaurant drag, ranging from greasy spoon Chinese to Michelin star (depending on who's chef at TJ's that year.) You can get better Korean or Indian down on El Camino, and there are some other cuisines you have to look around for, and it can be worth driving to Milpitas for some kinds of Chinese. (And sure, Nolan Bushnell had to open his own restaurant just to get one he thought was good enough, but that was the 80s and just because he built Chuck E. Cheese didn't mean he was going to eat there.)
And yeah, if the traffic isn't bad, it's because the economy is, but it's still better than LA or NYC. And unfortunately the trains really only work for going to the city, not coming from the city down here to work.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Sure, you can live in a city or you can live in burbs, and there are parts of the Valley you can't easily reach from the cities without an ugly drive, but it's still the same region and you get the cultural advantages of all of them if you want to pay attention. (On the other hand, I did get married before moving here, so nightlife has been a lot less important than if I were single. I had one friend who moved from San Jose up to the city because of that, but ended up falling in love with another musician who didn't live in the city either :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks