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Startups Ditching Silicon Valley For New Cities (economist.com)
The rising cost of living in Silicon Valley is pushing startups out, the Economist reports, and re-focusing innovation in new cities around the country [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From the story: More Americans are leaving the Valley than moving to it. In 2017 several counties in the area saw their largest combined domestic outward migrations in around a decade. In a recent survey by the Bay Area Council, a think-tank, 46% of Bay Area residents said they planned to leave in "the next few years," up from 34% in 2016. This is not just a case of people of more modest means being pushed out by carpet-bagging techies. At this year's "FOO camp," a freewheeling annual gathering of hackers and others, a session called "Should I/you leave the Bay Area?" saw a strong turnout. Participants shared their gripes about the high cost of living, bad traffic and a "toxic" culture obsessed with money.
The world is small, thanks to communications and travel systems. Why go to the Bay area with exceptionally high costs and congestion? If you want great central California weather, there are lots of places just down the coast around SLO that are great. The LA/Ventura/OC area is great. And then there's the rest of the country as well. The only reason to be in the Bay area is you want to be there because you perceive it has "extra value" in terms of how others perceive you. In essence - vanity.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The Bay Area (and California as a whole really) needs to wake up and take a cold, hard look at a number of things that will have a huge impact on their future. I'm in SoCal now, but many of the same issues are really going to come to a head here very shortly. I could live many other places with lower costs and avoid much of the stupid metropolitan planning debacle... and still have nice weather.
But, people have been bitching ever since they first got here, so take it all with a grain of salt. Money talks...
You can go to some of the remote areas of the US. And be able to find talent which is just as good if not better then what you can find in SV.
It isn't like it was 40 years ago, where talent had to be localized to particular areas. People are interconnected and talent can be anywhere.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...when you can work in a low tax, low cost state for some 75-90% of the salary?
"Gee, I can make the mortgage payment on a 3,000 square foot house in Austin for what it would cost me to rent a one bedroom apartment in Silicon Valley..."
Anti-growth policies keep more housing from being built, and extreme regulation drives companies away.
California is killing its own golden goose.
15 years ago I had an ex-GF who's sister worked in the Bay Area. She worked as a project manager, and couldn't afford a house, and was still renting at 35 years old. It just boggled my mind why she stayed.
Flash forward 15 years and it's gotten worse. Plus add in the nutty narrow beliefs over there (They freaking banned selling fur for gods sake!), and I just don't understand why anyone would want to live there. Haven't ya'll heard there's a whole other country out here? Everything I've heard about Silicone Valley is utter shit.
This will bring relief to their insane real estate market and reduce geographic income concentration. The only major reason to be in SV is for the venture capital anyway.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
LOL - I live in Ventura, nice and peaceful, much better weather, better beaches - and only 1 hour away from Los Angeles (which is a MUCH bigger, better city than SF). Why would I want to "splurge" on a $1.2MM 2 bedroom condo in SF when I can get a real 3+ bedroom house just 200 feet from the beach, for less money?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
This is old news. I've been hearing this story (and it's true about out-migration) my whole life. I remember when I first saw a big article about the "Hollowing Out of Silicon Valley" or something similar in the early/mid 1980s. The article was about how semiconductor and electronics manufacturing was the main employment driver in the San Jose area and the offshoring of manufacturing to Asia, coupled with high housing prices, was going to turn San Jose into Detroit by 1990. Didn't happen.
Interestingly, the article was mostly true. There aren't many (just a few) fabs left in Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley has mostly turned into Software Valley (and swallowed up San Francisco). What the article didn't anticipate was the combined strength of an innovative culture and importing the best of the best in the world to contribute. I think the cliched term is "Creative Destruction".
Every since the early 1990s I think more Americans leave California than move here. However, at least in the town I grew up in, it was mostly low-skilled Americans moving out and high-skilled moving in (which has led to SERIOUS gentrification). This effect, coupled with a lot of high-skilled foreign immigration, had made my area more dynamic than I've ever seen it.
When I was a kid, we had no ethnic food beyond Mexican and Chinese in my town. Now we just opened a Burmese restaurant to go along with the 20 other cultural restaurants. I think that's a sign of progress.
My whole life (and I'm in my 40s) California was a "Liberal Cesspool of Business-Hating Over-Regulation, one step away from a spectacular collapse". And yet, here we are, doing better than ever.
In western ny you can have a freaking mansion for 500k.
No wildfires, no earth quakes, plenty of water, beautiful area with depressed economy. Hidden little gem.
Insane government, out of control cost of living, street conditions that are driving conventions and tourists away https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.... https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/a...
Yeah, I think I'll look for someplace else with a pleasant climate and craft housing.
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I've a house in Concord, about 35 miles east of SF. I can scuba, surf, water ski, snow ski, hit a club in SF, San Jose, go to a farmers market or ranch. I work for company that has offices in Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Illinois, Texas, Alaska, and Hawaii, as well as internationally in numerous countries. One thing I will say is I can go outside for lunch and grab a random stranger who is more qualified than many of the 'specialists' we hire to work in our remote sites. I spend about 4 months of the year in Yuma, AZ with the snow birds working remotely and I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. Northern California is just an awesome place, Granted California has many issues, like the parasitic South, LA and the Hollywood set are reprehensible, but the central valley is cool, and the extreme north has the Trinity, I love me some green skunk weed. Some day I'd like to have a place in mountains of Colorado, but until you can truly get great broadband and live off the grid it is unlikely.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
This was a poorly researched fluff piece. Showing no reasons for folks leaving, and tossing in a few anecdotes, leaves the reader with more of a hypothesis than any facts. Sure, San Francisco is a sewer, sure land is insanely expensive, sure bay area isn't, IMO a great place to raise a family, but I don't see info other than a list of possible reasons, and then attempting to call correlation causality.
Fake news, indeed.
Clean water
just east of Salton Sea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
We need to build a wall around Silicon Valley for keeping those fuckers in. Every city those techies go they destroy the social fabric.
Better to keep then walled in all in one place. Bonus if it's a desolated place with no running water.
Dovetails with the recent CNBC article that listed places like Cincinnati and Chattanooga being the recipients of some such startups. Cali will be just fine but other cities stand to benefit.
Hell, if the "toxic culture obsessed with money" bothers you, you might as well look at emigrating from the country, not the Bay Area. Actually, you should probably find someplace off-planet from our own little slice if Ferringinar.
That is all.
46% of Bay Area residents said they planned to leave in "the next few years,"
I'd like to see some followup to see how many actually did leave. Moving is hard, staying is easy.
I've been "going to move out of the bay area in the next few years" for about 15 years. I finally did move out of the area earlier this year, but kept my house so I can move back if I want to.
The air is clean.
The streets are clean. No trash. No drugs. No waste on the streets.
Workers want to work.
No crime. Police enforce laws.
No tent cities.
No extra new taxes.
The company you work gets to pay less for power. The investors get more for their investment. Fast internet.
The workers enjoy more pay and the lower housing prices.
Governments allow that employee cafeterias..
Win. Win. Win for workers and investors.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Ventura is faggot town lol, you wanna-be-hollywood FAGGOT lol
When $500K buys you nothing but a teeny-weeny apartment in dodgy areas; when a $100K/yr salary is barely enough to feed a family of three; when you spend hours a day stuck in traffic jams, you know that your quality of life sucks to high heaven.
The Bay Area has a reputation for being a great place for startups to find talented developers. Now that the frenzy of the dot-com boom is simmering down, companies are finding out that there are talented people everywhere. Often, in other parts of the country, those talented people can be hired for a lot less than in California because the cost of living is lower. For companies that want to create new software-based businesses deliberately instead of frantically, there are lots of great cities around the country!
Utah has a swath of cities that has been dubbed The Silicon Slopes because pretty much every tech company is now here. Microsoft has set up offices. Adobe. Facebook is building a gigantic new datacenter. The NSA has their massive data facility here. Along with more startups than I can keep track of. The construction of office parks and buildings along a 30 mile stretch of freeway is insane. Housing prices here are great, power is cheap as well which is attracting large datacenters. Access to infrastructure is also easy, and Utah is taking advantage of it dumping hundreds of millions into freeway expansion and other projects to attract the business. Park City has also seen a lot of tech and start up growth as well using the "ski culture" the way California used the surf culture. Hit the slopes before work etc.