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Could High Bay-Area Prices Make Sacramento the Next Big Startup Hub?
waderoush (1271548) writes "Don't laugh. As the cost of housing spirals out of control on the San Francisco peninsula, neighboring metro regions like Sacramento are beginning to look more attractive to startup founders who prefer a Northern California lifestyle but haven't worked in the Silicon Valley gold mines long enough to become 1-percenters. Today Xconomy presents Part 1 of a two-part look at innovation in the Sacramento-Davis corridor and efforts to make the region more welcoming to high-tech entrepreneurs. In Sacramento's favor, there's a talented workforce fueled by a top-20 university (UC Davis), space for expansion, proximity to the ski mountains at Tahoe, and a far lower cost of living — the average house in Sacramento is selling for $237,000, compared to $909,000 in San Francisco. The downsides include a shortage of local investment dollars and a lower density of startups, meaning there's less opportunity for serendipitous collaboration. But locals say recent efforts to boost the local high-tech economy are working. 'I really feel like we are in a renaissance area,' says Eric Ullrich, co-founder of Hacker Lab, a Midtown Sacramento co-working space."
Full of over-entitled punks talking shit in an incestuous echo chamber. I lived there for a few months not so long ago as part of a system roll-out job. Shopkeepers, bar staff and cab drivers said they were constantly being abused and condescended to by them. Its gotten really really bad.
When the property bubble pops there, it will be sweet.
After living in SF for 10 years as an Independent Contractor, I realized that paying $3,100/month rent (house in the Presidio etc) was keeping me from doing anything productive other than working night and day on client projects or hunting for more projects when the work was done, I'd have ideas for apps and the like, but I'd be lucky to get two weeks into something only to get sucked into a project for a month or three, by which time, I'd be lucky to have another week or two to pick it up again, and by then had already forgotten where I was at and lost all momentum.
So I said fuck it, have been living out of a monthly hotel room billed as a "efficiency studio" (it has a full bath and kitchen), first in Sac and now in Fairfield, paying only $1,000/month including utils and housekeeping and have been making excellent progress creating some underlying frameworks and services that will be powering my app ideas. Yes, I still have to take clients and put down my personal projects, but now I take smaller projects for weeks at a time, not months at a a time and now my ambitions are really starting to come together, with my first round of OSS frameworks and services in reach. And while some people have looked down on me as trash for living out of a hotel instead of renting a house or apartment, fuck them. It's my life, ambition and goals, not theirs. Once I'm done, I plan on leaving the Bay Area, and hope to expat from the US and legally renounce my citizenship since I no longer view this as a Free Country under a Government that recognizes it's own Constitution, hence the desire to be as unencumbered as possible.