I'm curious why more bay area startups haven't come to Oakland. (maybe it's happening and it's just not obvious?)
Always felt like there was plenty of potential office space relatively close to BART but maybe that's wrong.
Always felt like there was plenty of potential office space relatively close to BART but maybe that's wrong.
The commute over the bridges is terrible, so with the bulk of investment capital and experienced engineers living on the peninsula (and oftentimes more down by Palo Alto & Menlo Park than in SF), it remains difficult to scale East Bay companies. Unless you're someone like Elon Musk where you can just invest $100M of your own capital and need more semi-skilled manufacturing workers than skilled software engineers. Fremont/Milpitas is coming up as a bedroom community for mid-career engineers though (because if you work at Facebook it's just across the Dumbarton, while if you work at Google/Apple you can take 237 and avoid the bridges), so that may increase the engineering supply along the East Bay BART corridor.
The East Bay really hurts from BART & Caltrain being two separate systems; it's easily BART accessible, but much of the peninsula's population only has Caltrain access, so you need a very time-consuming transfer to get there without dealing with the bridge traffic.
It will also be possible to commute from SJ or Santa Clara to Oakland via BART, which may marginally improve recruiting there.
It would be fantastic if Caltrain or somebody rebuilt the burnt-out rail bridge next to the Dumbarton, but that’s wishful thinking. It would be useful to integrate ACE, Caltrain, and Amtrak.
Fremont has a lot of potential if Caltrain were to reopen the old Dumbarton railroad:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/08/14/proposed-dumbarton-ra...
Facebook has offered to contribute but so far the Bay Area urbanist movements have been disappointingly silent about this.
The reverse commute (peninsula to east bay in the morning, east bay to peninsula in the evening) is perfectly fine, as long as you don't have to take 880 anywhere. If you can avoid 880, that reverse commute can be serene and almost surreal (as you whiz past gridlock coming in the other direction every day).
There are a bunch of industrial parks right over the bridge in Newark that seem like great places for a new small company.
Being near BART is fine, but not if your employees are coming from SF. Then they still need to pay SF salaries to make up for cost of living.
Living in Oakland can be less compelling due to the housing stock. Oakland has many single family homes, which I personally feel is a good thing, but less compelling for many workers.
(We can, of course, debate whether the kinds of workers who aren't in the life-stage to want/need a single family home are the right kinds of workers to go after, but that's a separate conversation.)
- BART is an extremely filthy and dangerous transit system by any 1st world standard, and I say this as a lifelong transit rider.
- Oakland, Berkeley, & Richmond govs/regs are business unfriendly & tech hostile. It's a traditionally poor working class area undergoing massive housing displacement & the political class is all old money or non-profit types.
This is hysteria. I have many coworkers who ride BART on a daily basis for 15+ years and not a single reported incident from any of them, other than stinky homeless people that very rarely ride during peak hours.
Have you personally taken BART on a consistent enough basis? I took it two days a week for a significant length of time and calling it filthy is not hysteria at all.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/BART-s-approval-...
slightly depends on your entry/exit stations but I would regularly see crack/heroin use, defecation, deranged meth heads screaming and/or picking fights. I doubt I am alone in this.
Ridership has increased 22% over the past decade, however violent crime has increased 75% over the same period.
I've taken public transit all my life and I'm scared every time I take the bart :/
Kind of makes you wonder why the existing folks are hostile...
Square just took the building Uber was building out, all 356,000 sqft. This is going to make them the largest tech company in Oakland.
And some company named Marqeta just put their name on a building...no idea how long they have been here but they now have enough money to have their name on both sides.
Its slow but its definitely changing.
And you think those companies will forfeit their offices in the city/SV?
Maybe you can kindly migrate back to where you came from?
maybe Republicans can teach them something, by, for example, the coastal city of......Knoxville, TN.
:-D
An improvement in the way living in an ancient car is an improvement over sleeping in small pox blankets.
But blaming an employee for living where he works is misguided, they're not the ones asking outrageous prices.
If I had to guess, I'd say race and class conflict. I wasn't used to how heavily divided a culture could geographically be, and it seemed to me that Oakland was far more heavily multi-ethnic and financially poorer than the rest of the area.
Before the hate poors in:
- Yes, Canada still has a racism problem. But I don't know of any areas around me that are strongly of one ethnicity versus another. The major exception being "Indian" reserves, which is a whole other topic.
- Yes, it's ridiculous for me to comment after only one visit. But that's how strong the difference seemed to be. Every cab and uber driver I had was from Oakland.
- SF was beautiful and I don't mean any disparagement. You're all wonderful people and I love you.
"Really starting to enjoy Oakland—have you been to Drake's?" is the new climbing, hiking, etc.
Poor is. The Bay Area is one of the least racist places I've lived in in my life, but it's also one of the most classist. There's still a big class stigma based on where you live. (Though sometimes gentrification flips this on its head - the Mission and EPA used to be poor, crime-ridden areas, but now they're rich, crime-ridden areas.) It's very strange - I think that people who are used to the race & class social systems of much of the rest of North America don't really know what to make about the Bay Area, because in some ways we've busted out of those social systems and just replaced them with other ones which are...weird.
The rich get crime-ridden places, too? Sounds less classist than most places.
The reason I say it's classist is that because you have both millionaires and people who are dead broke in the same space, people have invented a lot of subtle social signaling cues to understand just who they are dealing with. Like when my wife & I go house hunting, every realtor asks "Where do you work?", and we answer "Los Altos" and "from home", and then my wife says afterwards "I think they meant which company do you work at?" Or the time I met a black dude on Muni who had a bet with his girlfriend that he could identify techies by sight, because he asked me "Excuse me. Are you a techie?" and then got it right (apparently it was the Columbia fleece that gave it away, which is odd to me because it cost me < $20 off Amazon). Or the realtor who first took me around when I moved out here, showed me a kindy dumpy midtown Palo Alto apartment, then said "It's got a Palo Alto zip. That's important to some people."
Undoubtedly this happens in the rest of the U.S, but it's different in the Bay Area, precisely because wealthy and poor live in such constrained spaces. Many of the social signals of wealth in the rest of the U.S. don't apply here because they're stupid - if you park your Lambo in the Mission, it will get taken for a joyride, if you wear an Armani handbag it will get lifted from your car, and there's no room for your gated community outside of Atherton. Our billionaires are too busy coding, raising capital, rollerblading, and kiteboarding to worry about things like their wardrobe or car. You get startup founders who own companies worth tens of millions and yet use a 5-year-old iPhone with a cracked screen.
It's incredible that this could ever be considered "normal". And all in the name of political correctness, no less.
The car thing, though, everyone in SF who street parks has had their window shattered and car scavenged...
It seems like the East side of the Mission (Folsom & Van Ness) is significantly less safe than the west side (Valencia & Guerrero) - I'll walk down Valencia and feel perfectly safe, while I'm always looking around me between Mission & Folsom.
"It's got a Palo Alto zip. That's important to some people."
Berkeley is the really underrated place, IMO. Somehow they went from being the city with the whacko leftist government as a negative outlier, to actually being relatively sane as a city in the area. Emeryville is the only really good government in the are, though.
It's an interesting discussion because the city is huge and has many good and bad parts. West Oakland along Broadway is basically SF west. Go east of Lake Merritt and things get bad pretty quickly.
Tons of small shops, including consulting, freelancing, etc, in Oakland. Companies with people who need to go to SF on a semi-regular basis and who work best in person but don't need to be in SF.
Because it's rare, when an SF person does come out here to visit, I feel really loved. :)
Please let's make smarter choices about where to move businesses to, given numerous options. Oakland definitely should not be one of them.
Violent crime is twice higher in Oakland, but property crime is about the same: 5,983 per 100,000 in Oakland [1]; 5,715 in SF [2] (6,168 according to [3]).
[1] https://www.areavibes.com/oakland-ca/crime/
[2] https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rat...
Poverty is always touted as the source of crime in communities, but businesses moving from SF to Oakland wouldn't be employing Joe/Jolene poor person. If anything, doing so would just rehash the standard complaint about gentrification and alienation of current residents.
population of Chicago: 2.716 million (2017) population of Oakland: 425,195 (2017)