Slashdot Mirror
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. :-(
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.
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.
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.
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.... :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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.
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.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
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
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...
You have to be nutters to live in SF.
Or fruits.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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.