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> Many of us from early on argued that SV had no vision.

I don't know what it means for a geographic region to "have vision". Either way, SV was the birthplace of an incredibly large portion of the ventures and entrepreneurs that created what we refer to as "modern technology".

And I'm saying that as someone who is often very critical of current SV and NorCal policies in general.

> When you see some houses filled with 7-8 occupant because they can't afford rent, you know this is not sustainable.

Sure, but what does that have to do with "vision"?

The area experienced an enormous, extraordinary amount of success, which had some undesirable effects, particularly for low-income residents. It should be addressed, and there are many issues in SV current, some of which are mentioned in the article.

Still can't take away from the incredible breakthroughs that happened in the area.

Vision means that you do things in a way that isn't the default. Because if you just do the default you end up like everywhere else (which of course can be a good thing in some cases). The problems in the Bay Area isn't unique by any means. But not dealing with them means that they more and more lose their competitive advantage. Overall they become more like somewhere like e.g. New York.

Vision without wisdom is always myopic. People have a tendency to mistake smartness for wisdom. A grave error. Why is it that everything we touch gets ruined?

They could have easily use their weight, reach and influence to envision and build an entire tech city community. It's not that hard.

It’s actually very hard. Most available land has already been built up. Cities are very strict about zoning and not allowing additional development. Tech companies can’t just steamroll the local governments. It’s very much a poor governance situation.

I agree with your conclusion, I just don’t believe Big Tech can fix it so easily.

Local governments are typically very easy to influence. Especially when you are the largest tax provider.

Mountain View required Facebook to give up the free meals benefit to lease a building. Google jumped through tons of hoops to develop housing in Mountain View.

Palo Alto has blocked new housing for the last decade. They enforce strict zoning that has curtailed commercial development too.

Well, sure. If you're going to bluff the car salesman, you have to be willing to walk out of the dealership (otherwise it really is just a bluff).

...and then you haven't actually influenced the local government, you've just found a new one.

One would hope that a local government that lost its town Facebook or Google would be influenced by that loss, but maybe things are actually so bad that they wouldn't be.

Many of the people who are long time residents and home owners in Mountain View wouldn't shed a tear if Google packed up and left. The general local attitude toward those large tech companies is ambivalent at best.

Yes, I know. They aren't going to change that position voluntarily. I strongly suspect that state intervention is inevitable.

> Mountain View required Facebook to give up the free meals benefit to lease a building

Not quite. The rule is that for offices in the Village at San Antonio Center project meals within an office cannot be subsidized more than 50% on a regular basis. Meals that are in restaurants that are open to the public can be subsidized as often and as much as the office wants to.

That development includes several restaurants. I expect Facebook will make arrangements to use them to provide Facebook's free meal benefit at that development.

The point is that local governments are making companies jump through hoops to get space.

not true either, it is the opposite, in fact. see more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bl19RoR7lc

If Big Tech wanted to fix it, they could. They have the capital to purchase new governance in California & the Bay to effectively change the laws to foster growth.

The zeitgeist of local politics has been moving against them. With attacks on commuter buses, rallies, and blame for the housing crises assigned to them.

>They have the capital to purchase new governance in California & the Bay to effectively change the laws to foster growth

That's not exactly a good thing. One day it's sponsoring cheap apartments, the next it's dissolving labor laws.

Despite popular opinion, you can't actually just throw money at politicians and get them to do whatever you want. Politicians need money because it helps them get votes, but allowing dense housing in neighborhoods full of single family homes is a great way to lose votes. No amount of money will make up for that at the polls.

Buying politicians isn’t leadership.

Leadership is saying “I’m willing to lose some of my home price appreciation in the short term to keep the ecosystem thriving”

Unfortunately, only residents get to vote, not people who are just working there during the day. And these areas are so expensive, most of their workers commute from outside.

California has an initiative system. If Big Tech wanted to get more housing built, it could do so, and it wouldn't require any changes in elected officials.

How about to diversify geographically??

Our next campus needs to handle buildings up to 8 stories high, plus apartment buildings the same height for all our jobs were bringing.. I guess we can't come to your town.

Repeat that 2 or 3 times, and the problem goes away quickly..

SV has never been about quality of life. Since at least WW2, it's a region that eats its old, a place that welcomes new waves of migrants all hoping to strike it rich in the next gold rush.

From the literal gold rush in the 1850s to the Gilded Age inventions of the 1880s-1910s to the agricultural migration of the 20s and 30s to the WW2 construction boom to the post-war nukes & ballistic missile boom to the hippies & beatniks of the 60s to the integrated circuit to the microcomputer to the Internet to the mobile phone, the Bay Area's always been defined by its ability to impoverish the folks who found paradise in the last wave in favor of fully capitalizing on the next wave. It does this largely by attracting young immigrants from all over the world who are willing to put up with shitty conditions and work themselves to the bone for a few years so that they can sock away a few dollars. Those that succeed in this usually go elsewhere to retire or raise a family.

There's no evidence that this conveyor belt has stopped or slowed down - 2 of the 3 largest Bitcoin exchanges in the U.S. (Coinbase and Kraken) are in SF, I still meet plenty of starry-eyed 20-somethings who are working long hours thinking they're going to get rich, and I also know plenty of people who've made their low-millions working for a big tech company and are now moving to an area where that will let them retire at 35 rather than barely afford a small house.

News articles always seem to point out that the quality of life is shitty in San Francisco and the economic drivers are unsustainable. That's always been the case. The Bay Area's specialty is in making an industry out of unsustainability; the culture here has gotten very good at finding the next exploitable resource and exploiting it before the rest of the world realizes it's important, and then encouraging people to move on once it's no longer profitable.

I think a lot of people misjudge Silicon Valley. They aren't where they are because of vision. They are there because they managed to control much of technology. They aren't going to give away any opportunities regardless if it is housing or smart phones. They of course have to keep up appearances, some might even believe it, but the reality is that if housing became cheap people would lose hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. And if they let go of control of the technology market they would lose a lot of market share, if not their jobs.

I personally don't think there has ever been any real indication that the Bay Area would become utopian. It is just that there used to be a "flaw" (relative to US society) where technology was undervalued, so opportunities were cheap. That has now been corrected, so you are paying for those opportunities.

Yep, I haven't been to Belarus yet. But I'm living in the south of Russia and working remotely for a US company. My quality of life is several times better than the Valley (or even Atlanta, where I am from). And this is in a country considered "inferior" to the US.

Maybe there's not much in terms of a startup community or VC funding, but I can walk to the grocery store, to the craft beer pub, to the beach (or take a cheap bus/taxi). Plus, I have a nice new apartment for less than the cost of utilities back in the US.

I'm not disagreeing in a general sense, but I suspect you could very roughly get the same thing in some rural areasb(of course not all rural areas) in many nation's, including the US where you would have more access to remote US jobs.

>> It's not that hard.

Please elaborate. I'm sure everyone looking to turn their little Silicon Alley, Meadows, Walkway into a thriving techno metropolis is all ears.

I really don't think they do. Most, if not all, of these "the next Silicon Valley" is about self-promotion. More often than not there isn't any good way to get an apartment, visa or any sort of unique thing to suggest that it would be a good idea to actually go there. If anything they put up a lot of artificial barriers to pretend that there is something going on while in reality technology projects, startups and talent already have to and should compete in the market.

What people are lacking isn't some phony experts but time, space and motivation. Give people that in ample supply and the rest will sort itself out.

I spent a couple of years studying in Belarus at the Minsk State Linguistic University, I had a good time there. I visit Ukraine often to visit friends who work in software. I might be back in Minsk later in the year. If you like, send me an email, I'll take you for a plov and milkshake at the central market. I guess you know the spot. :-)

The only person in Silicon Valley who I think had a vision for Silicon Valley was John Arrillaga. Someone like a Steve Jobs or a Larry Page wasn't thinking of Silicon Valley. These people stuck to their knitting.

Yup, it's awful here, everyone please leave.

I hear Seattle is the place to be, go there.

Seattle is terrible, it rains all the time. You don't want to move here. Try Portland.

For all I know, Belarus is an amazing place to live, but there are real economic factors. The GDP of Belarus is ~$47 billion ($4,989 per capita). That's about the same total economic output as Albuquerque, NM or Knoxville, TN (each of which achieve their numbers with about 10 times fewer people than Belarus (meaning, of course, that the per capita GDP in those cities is also about 10x)).

Americans wildly underestimate the economic power of the United States. There are dozens of "small" U.S. metros that match the productivity of Belarus.

And those are the small metros. There are dozens more totally ignored "flyover dumps" -- think Cleveland, St. Louis, Kansas City, Columbus, etc -- with GDPs 3 or 4 or 5 times that of Belarus.

And only then do you get to an "irrelevant, dying" place like Detroit, whose GDP is ~$280 billion (about 6x that of Belarus).

Most of these comparisons shouldn't ever leave the gate.

But he is talking about the quality of life, not the GDP. Things I assume are much cheaper in Belarus and he or she estimates that people's quality of life there is better. I've never been both places like they have so I will take their word for it.

> But he is talking about the quality of life, not the GDP.

The suggestion that these two things aren't related is an extraordinary claim.

What good is a high GDP though? It just means that you pay more for a crappier appartment.

PPP-adjusted the cities of New York and Los Angles are still out-ranking countries like Australia, which by metrics of size, natural resources, age, and avoidance of WWII destruction should logically be on par with the United States. For whatever reason the U.S. really just has absurd amounts of economic output.

Many places in both the US / UK are overvalued relative to their economical value.

Some developer in Glasgow tried selling us a parking lot - we did the math and there was no way it would generate enough income to collect on its price. We were better off directing our investment where the math worked (emerging markets, etc).

The parking lot had a higher price then an entire chemical plant in Kenya that had a monopoly on supplying life saving generic drugs to 3 countries in Eastern Africa.

A lot of valuation in the US / UK is based on the dollar having reverse currency status, so don't get on your high horse about the US being more 'productive'.

It didn't stop the glasgow parking lot gaining it value afterwards, but as the saying goes - "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".

> so don't get on your high horse about the US being more 'productive'.

I'm not on a horse of any size.

"Tractor production is up 7% this year! Milk production is up 4%! We don't need your frivolous Apple gadgets!"

Just joking. [In every joke there is a portion of joke..]

I hate comparisons like this; purchasing power parity GDP is much different and much more useful for comparisons than raw GDP. "National purchasing power parity income" is the old timey comparison that actually measures what you want to measure. Otherwise you're mostly just comparing how cheap the rent is in Belarus.

Is there some number for how much value your foreign dollars buy you in different economies? GDP = $ people earn, PPP GDP = GDP * [value for money fudge factor], so maybe: [value for money fudge factor] = PPP/GDP ?

I agree with you. I grabbed a crude, available measure. But my argument stands by most ways of measuring (and the one I chose, while crude, doesn’t tell us nothing, despite what some of the commenters here suggest).

It's more difficult to find PPP data for cities than it is states, but here's the latter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_U.S._states...

And for Belarus:

https://tradingeconomics.com/belarus/gdp-per-capita-ppp

You're right to notice that it's a better measure, but it still favors the spirit of my argument.

Leadership cares about their immediate bottomline > > > Profit

The Bay Area was utopian before tech. The tech is just a peripheral. It can be argued, though obviously not in this article, that tech ruined utopia. Should it leave, which it won't due to the high desirability of culture and universities, whatever should replace will only be more important to people's lives.

The Bay Area was defense industry before it was tech. Moreover, it was dotted with bases before the realignment commissions of the 90s closed pretty much all of them.

Maybe looking at a region in terms of industry isn't the best measuring tool. Defense was a major industry (before that gold/mining) as was shipping and education and the related services to support these industries. The industries that were smaller than defense in the Bay Area were larger than the top industries in other places. There was greater balance in the ecosystem.