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Comment by ghobs91 | Hacker News Reader

Outside of having top notch universities, the biggest indicator of a city's ability to have a big tech industry is the size of the VC community.

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.

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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 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.)

There is nowhere on earth that can't be made pleasant to live if you have enough money to do it. More to the point, I'm always confused how VCs actively encourage pissing away their own money on somebody else's rent. Sure, spend your own scratch on an $8 million 1000sqft half-lot house, but why not actively encourage others to make your money go farther.

Rent is just another overhead. What good is it to save 50% on investment by moving to the middle of nowhere when you can't readily hire anybody?

Sure enough, other cities are up and coming, but it takes time.

You don't even need to move to the middle of nowhere. Basically anywhere else would work. Even San Diego is rather substantially cheaper than the SF bay and the weather there is orders of magnitude better.

San Diego has the tenth highest rent in the US and while it may be cheaper in absolute terms, the average salaries are lower too.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/real-estate/sd...

Sure, I'm not saying pay people the local prevailing wage. I'm saying pay people the same and let them keep way more of that money, or hire more devs, or have nicer offices, or whatever. Just stop handing it to landlords in the Bay.

The problem is that outside of a few tech hubs, most companies are unwilling to pay developers salaries that even come close to what they can make in a tech hub. So the best developers move to the tech hubs, where the jobs tend to be more interesting and pay better. Plenty of people would take a 25% pay cut to live in a cheaper city than SF, but the reality is that they might have to take a pay cut of 50% or more, and even when you adjust for cost of living, that sort of pay difference is still dramatic (housing might be cheaper in many cities, but car ownership, healthcare, groceries and your kids' college tuition are largely the same).

Great point, something I've wondered myself. You'd think with the immense amount of money and influence tech companies and VCs wield, they'd do more to out-lobby the NIMBY homeowners and get denser housing approved.

No amount of money can fix humidity, lack of sunshine, or lack of mountains/ocean and the corresponding activities possible with them (or whatever other natural feature one prefers). Saudi Arabia and UAE can spend all of their natural resource wealth building shiny buildings, but it's still a desert. Also, no one has the amount of wealth needed to stabilize a whole country to make it politically stable and secure.

To be very honest weather is the least of the concerns. Otherwise other cities wouldn't have gatherings of people.

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

Those other cities around the valley are just as NIMBY and impacted as SF is, and the problem is even worse because the local governance structure is fractured. Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Cupertino are all separate cities with their own mayors and councils and zoning restrictions

California is not only the valley

San Diego is pretty good and not that far :)

and that is why San Diego rents are heating up.

Talk about heating up! My rent in Carmel Valley increased by 10% last month!

More than half of San Diego renters spend 30%+ of income on rent, making it one of the least affordable areas in the country.

https://www.kpbs.org/news/2019/jan/03/more-half-san-diego-co...

If you want to sell software, it's good to be situated physically next to the biggest software companies in the world. I work in the Valley (but live on the East Coast), and having your company immersed in that culture can have benefits. There is a certain perception that persists, a certain level of legitimacy you are granted just for living alongside the Big Boys. Along with the accompanying downsides, of course. The answer to why VCs stay in the Valley is because it's been working for them.

VCs are one piece of the equation, but so is talent. Google could care less about VC money at this point, but they have large presences in Boston and New York where there's a strong local talent pool to draw from. And there's not much talent outside of certain cities, because the best talent from other areas tend to move to these cities.

> VCs are largely already wealthy, and SF is a pleasant city to live in if you're already wealthy.

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.

>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?

Perhaps I'm not talking about the same "city" or the same "really wealthy people".

Probably.

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 don't live in Napa Valley, new money does. Totally different thing. Napa Valley is to San Fran what the Hamptons are to New York. IE - the place boringly nouveau riche go to emulate the rich of yesteryear.

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.

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