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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

Or the solution could be to do nothing. Do we all have to live in SF? If the people living there want to spend all their money on rent or mortgage interest it is fine by me.

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Eventually, yeah, there's a breaking point and industry will abandon that area.

But in the meantime, excluding people from one of the most economically productive places on the planet is hugely detrimental for the 'marginal' people who end up not living and working there. The economy overall loses out a lot, too.

https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5901041/nimbys-are-costing-the...

Also: there's a climate change argument to all of this. Forcing people out of a region that actually claims to care about it into places like, say, Phoenix or Las Vegas or Dallas or other sprawly places entirely dependent on cars... is not a win for the environment.

I would say the breaking point has already been reached. There are heaps of better places to live with a vastly lower costs. All we need to do is convince the VCs to fund startups in these places and we can all forget about SF.

> All we need to do is convince the VCs to fund startups in these places and we can all forget about SF

And you need to make sure there's a big talent pool there, and good universities.

A few places are close to that, but it's not so easy to replicate.

This book talks about it some: https://amzn.to/2XAU3f0

And most of the places that are close have rampant NIMBYism problems of their own.

If anything, talent is getting more concentrated. The Boston region has lost a lot of its tech companies, for instance.

The problem is very few of them are better enough to be an advantage. Almost all of them have similar problem just at lesser scales, which means they can't handle much of a change. The things with place like SFBA and NYC is that as bad as they are you know what you get.

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