VCs are largely already wealthy, and SF is a pleasant city to live in if you're already wealthy. As such, they have little incentive to move, and so founders will continue to flock there to start their companies.
I completely agree that shopping around for cities should be easier, so that city governments like SF are forced to get their head out of their ass and make their city competitive.
However, until SF becomes unpleasant to live in for rich people, not much is going to change.
And apparently, little incentive to improve their city and environment. What the wealthy need to realize is that human nature is hard wired to notice relative wealth inequality. Crime and social unrest are directly related to perceptions of relative wealth inequality. Past a certain point, life expectancy is directly correlated with relative wealth inequality, not absolute wealth. [b]
http://www.sfindicatorproject.org/indicators/view/146
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/15/income-inequality-in-...
([b] Ichiro Kawachi, 2000. Income Inequality and Health. In Social Epidemiology. Eds. Lisa Berkman and Ichiro Kawachi. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 76-94.)
Nobody is saying they should put all the money into turning a developing country in the USA, but maybe they can, I don't know, try other cities around the valley and not get crammed all together into one city that's naturally restricted in growth
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2019/jan/03/more-half-san-diego-co...
Sure enough, other cities are up and coming, but it takes time.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/real-estate/sd...
Is it though? I feel SF is a rathole that is occupied by a lot of people who overpay for rent because their salary allows them to.
If you're really wealthy, you're not going to be living in the city at all.
???
Huh?
Are you talking about the same San Francisco as everyone else here?
The rich live in San Francisco, the wealthy live in Napa Valley / Sonoma County. Can't fit a helipad, two tennis courts, putting green, and an olympic size swimming pool downtown.
The wealthy have their own very large islands. Islands that are very likely nature preserves. They don't need Napa Valley. I can assure you though, that the wealthy also have homes all over the world. And I guarantee you that crappy cities that smell like pee, such as London, San Fran, and Paris, are on their holdings list.
That's just the way it is, cool kids want to hang out with cool kids. And when they're not, they want their privacy.
They do. Amazon's HQ2 search was the most public of these, but other companies are expanding as well.
Apple, without much fanfare, announced a gigantic second campus in Austin, as well as locations in several other cities: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/12/apple-to-build-new-ca...
Last month, Google announced the lease of a 35-story tower in downtown Austin for up to 5,000 employees: https://www.statesman.com/news/20190131/source-google-to-occ...
Facebook announced the lease of a 17-story tower in north Austin last September: https://www.statesman.com/business/20180906/sources-facebook...
These are just Austin (since I live in Austin, I'm familiar with these stories) and just 3 big tech companies. Other tech companies are also expanding in other cities.
The cost of living has gotten so out of control in the SF Bay Area that these companies can no longer hire and retain good engineers. Also, it took more than 20 years to change this opinion, but companies are finally starting to embrace remote work and remote workers.
There's now a popular trend starting too, where founders live in the Bay Area long enough to get a demo off the ground and raise capital, then leave for greener (cheaper) pastures: https://www.axios.com/entrepreneurs-leaving-bay-area-for-nex...
Unless California can un-gridlock its housing, I expect this trend will only continue.
Notice, none of them are moving any important people to places like St Louis, or Omaha, or Little Rock, or wherever. Those places are much less expensive than Austin or NoVA, but the tech companies don't really have to be there.
Silicon valley is leaking, starting with places that have huge amounts of cash and have already hired everyone they can in the Bay.
They'll start by offering a few people to transfer with same pay to a way lower cost of living city with a different/better for them lifestyle. Enough will bite and those people will then spin up the new hires.
+1
The challenge is that remote offices are difficult to work with. Logistical difficulties like time zones and remote conferencing aside, often you get an all-you-see-is-all-there-is effect from senior management who tend to bias towards the area they are in vs. remote offices which encourages the most ambitious people to relocate back to the mother ship. This then trickles down the corporate ladder - the remote offices will have less exciting or visible projects, so employees there have lower chances at promotion, which provides an incentive for them to move too. It's not a question of companies opening remote offices, it's how they can reduce the effect of gravity that pulls employees back.
Gravity aside, the problems described in the article also exist in these other cities too. I'm living in Boulder right now and the NIMBYism is strong here too - I definitely would not be able to afford a house in the city itself.
It actually is easier to reform cities than it is to relocate everybody that is made worse off by their poor decisions. And since San Francisco's poor decisions are negatively affecting every city within a 100mi radius, it would make sense for the state intervention to be the tool that brings the change.
NIMBY and high rent isn’t just an SF problem, as this article notes. It’s just easier to focus on SF because its problems are well-documented.
My neighborhood association just sent us this today:
I don't know what to do in SF other than trying another round of electing supervisors at large. The way the "supervisorial courtesy" works in the city turns neighborhoods into inviolable fiefdoms. I can influence my supervisor, but my district isn't going to be able to solve the various urban decay problems on its own.
You say that without giving an alternative explanation. If it's not the tech jobs (and the jobs built around them) that raised demand so much, what else is it?
> In the 80s the blame was finance.
Again, why do you assume that finance was just the scapegoat, not the actual reason?