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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

The comparison is really apples and oranges: 1. One is in the center of a job district where you can often walk to work (Manhattan) and the other (Sunnyvale) has some jobs but is generally 30min to 120min from the center-of-gravity of jobs. 2. How much do you value your time? I'd pay that much in Manhattan because it would allow me to spend 2.5h more per day with my family (when I worked in Manhattan, i strolled to work) 3. Property taxes are generally higher in CA, as is upkeep and insurance on these homes 4. You need 2 cars in Sunnyvale generally, but in Manhattan you can live very comfortably w/o cars and overspend on the apartment.

There are so many things that make this an apples-to-oranges comparison, the above list is not comprehensive.

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I actually agree with your general point, which is that Manhattan presents a much more single car friendly work environment but disagree with your characterization of Sunnyvale.

I chose to buy my house in Sunnyvale because it was near the "center" of things (and for a time that was a bit more literal than I expected). Within ~30 minutes of downtown Sunnyvale by bike you can work at Apple, Google, LinkedIn, HP, Yahoo!, NetApp, Intel, AMD, and Amazon. Not walkable but not particularly bad either.

I do stand corrected on Sunnyvale's centrality (i'm actually looking for a place to move to, so this discussion is superb) -- but wouldn't you be 90+min away from all the SF jobs? Perhaps I'm not weighting this correctly, but the center of gravity seemed to reside somewhere between Palo Alto and SF west of PA and east of SF...thoughts? Is there a good visualization on this?

BTW, Manhattan presents something even better than single car friendly -- zero-car friendly. We only temporarily got a car once we had infants, since carrying around car-seats was a pain. Most other times, we've been just-in-time with Uber or just plain walking/subway.

Like most things it is a bit nuanced. San Francisco is a bit over 40 miles north of "Silicon Valley[1]". The "big" companies often have large campuses closer to Silicon Valley than San Francisco as it is generally possible to build on larger lots and less expensively (outward rather than upward). The big new Apple campus? In Cupertino which is further south than Sunnyvale. The big new Google campus? Near Moffett field and Mountain View, a bit north of Sunnyvale. The Facebook campus, Menlo Park (north of Sunnyvale, about 1/4 of the way to San Francisco).

However, there are a bunch of startups actually in San Francisco, Uber and AirBnB being ones that get a lot of airtime, and Twitter (which is no longer a startup). There are lots and lots of pre-revenue 2 - 15 employee companies there as well. YCombinator is in Mountain View which is right next to Sunnyvale, and about 36 miles from San Francisco.

San Francisco is urban and hip and all of that, and a lot of people want to live there. Then they take bespoke busses and ride down the peninsula to places in the "south bay" (the collective term for the communities at the southern end of San Francisco bay). That is part of the issue that SF residents have, which is people who live in SF but work somewhere else, they are able to pay higher prices and the bus eliminates the commute disincentive.

On either side of the bay between these two loci are a number of vibrant and interesting places as well, on the west side you have the peninsula cities of Burlingame, San Mateo, Redwood City, San Carlos, and on the eastern side you have Oakland, Hayward, Berkeley, and Richmond.

Somewhat remarkably they have their own micro-climates so you get different weather depending on where you are.

Cities in the north and on the east of the bay have BART service, cities on the south and west of the bay have CalTrain service. There are three major airports one east (Oakland), one south (San Jose), and one west (SFO). Efforts to turn Hamilton Air Force base in Marin county into a northern airport have been rebuffed several times.

If you are not working at a company that is actually located in San Francisco you will have a shorter/easier commute if you live outside of San Francisco (typically on the east or west side of the bay that your company is on). You will also pay less for an apartment/house.

[1] Which is nominally the Santa Clara Valley where all of the semiconductor companies were located.

Appreciate all comments in this thread. I never lived on the west coast (Boston mostly) but I was always puzzled by how many of my acquaintances who moved there over the years to work for $BIG_TECH_CO chose to live in San Francisco proper. This usually meant at least an hour commute each way. The typical explanation was that SF was a "fun" place to live with much better leisure options than the desolate office parks and suburbs of the SV towns.

> The typical explanation was that SF was a "fun" place to live with much better leisure options than the desolate office parks and suburbs of the SV towns.

Depends on your definition of fun - being harassed constantly by both homeless people and SFPD? If so, then a paradise awaits you.

Everything in SF closes at 10 PM. Even the bars shut down at midnight. Not very fun.

Now, it's been a few years sin e I've bothered with SF nightlife (having lived near, but not in, the city) but has it really changed that much? Because I remember there being plenty open much later, and many times starting at 10 or later.

This is inaccurate. Most bars in SF are open until 2am, and The Endup is open all night and into the morning.

> On either side of the bay between these two loci are a number of vibrant and interesting places as well

I wouldn't call them either of those things; they're very nice suburbs on the Peninsula (west side) and less nice suburbs in East Bay. The northeastern ones (Danville, Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond) are too far to commute to South Bay from. And none of them are interesting.

There's also public transit up and down the Peninsula but it's very unreliable because the governments here refuse to invest in anything, or build anything, in the hopes it'll make everyone leave again.

Thanks - I stand corrected. I've been to SF and much further south, I didn't quite realise/remember that the suburbs start so close to the bay.

Sunnyvale seems much closer to the true "center of gravity" of Bay Area tech jobs than SF. SF has startup jobs, but those are staffed mostly by 20-somethings who can't afford houses anyway.

I think that was certainly true for the last 30 years but as more things start up further away, some of those things can grow into their own "centers". For example when IBM decided to build a west coast center for Watson they chose 505 Howard in San Francisco over space in San Jose or one of the Peninsula cities. At one time they owned two reasonably sized buildings that corner of El Camino and Page Mill Road in Palo Alto. So they felt that some of the center of gravity had shifted.

Most people in NYC can't live close enough to work to walk - only about 318k. And they walk on average 32min a day.

To be fair, 32 mins of walking every day is significantly more enjoyable than 32 minutes of car driving. In general given a similar duration, walking > biking == transit > driving.

Sometimes it is, maybe not in the snow or rain, or on the hottest days of summer. I think the value is in short commutes, regardless of mode.

Not always. I used to walk 25 minutes to work from one part of DC to another. Walking along a busy commuter road, crossing several busy streets with turning vehicles and others that run red lights, passing the graffiti-tagged building and homeless people in a tunnel under the railroad track, too loud to listen to anything through most headphones, but you better not turn your headphones up too loud because you have to keep your wits about you. And that's when it's not raining or snowing--snow? Of course people don't shovel snow and the plows push it onto the sidewalk. I bought a full rain suit for wet days.

I now have a longer drive and I am much happier. Having been to Manhattan I doubt walking there is much more pleasant either. Walking in a small town would be nice. Not in big cities.

speak for yourself... my own ideal is about a half hour commute in mostly freeway traffic. I live pretty centrally in Phoenix, and my commute is usually against traffic both ways. I enjoy driving so much that most of my vacations the past few years have been road trips. Been up the Pacific Coast a few times, straight up through AZ-UT-WY-ID and back, etc.

I find driving relaxing, it's got just enough attention to be a distraction from the stray thoughts, and with music, enjoyable enough to work past any driving frustrations.

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