A technology writer visits the Bay Area for the first time | Hacker News Reader

A technology writer visits the Bay Area for the first time

economist.com

21 pointssohkamyung15 comments

Best part of the piece:

“In the Bay Area, though, many young tech workers live in the city and commute out. Every day dozens of plush, Wi-Fi-enabled buses ferry workers out to the Valley. It is 40 miles (or 64km) from downtown San Francisco to Mountain View, where Google is headquartered, roughly the same distance as from central London to Reading, or from midtown Manhattan to Edison, New Jersey.

Those who cannot bear this commute—generally workers with children—live out in the Valley itself, a bleak, featureless sprawl of American exurbia. It is all office parks, strip malls, single-family homes and highways. Anybody looking for a “there” will be disappointed.”

I don’t know how we’ve accepted a place that has so much diversity, so much money, so much natural beauty - and yet, it’s so blasé and ugly. Between San Francisco and Santa Cruz is an architectural and cultural wasteland.

Is it worse than any other American suburb?

No, about the same. Just a bit more expensive to live there.

That's a low bar, though. I don't know if the DFW area suburbs are unusually bad, but my experience of them rank among the worst places I've ever been: generically-named suburbs connected via highways to generic mall areas (Kroger's, Walmart, Trader Joe's, or the fancier places with the aforementioned plus generic cinema and restaurants). The closest thing to something non-generic were tiny pockets along the way that had various tacky stores: barber-shop, dollar-store, nail salon, etc.

I found myself baffled at how anyone could be happy living in a place like that, where even going to the generic take-out place meant walking through your shoddily-built air-conditioned house and garage, getting into you air-conditioned car, and driving to a spot that was literally within viewing distance of your generic backyard, but inaccessibly on foot because of the highway in between.

EDIT: I'll add that it was the shoddiness of everything up close that shocked me most. Houses were large, but upon closer inspection everything was just gaudy and off and cheap and ill-fitting, from door handles to sinks to fences. I thought the McMansion thing was an exaggeration, but in the various suburbs and malls I visited, it was standard.

You have to know where to go. The really good innovative stores and restaurants are stashed away in strip malls, because the rents in SF are so expensive, all the stores and restaurants sort of look the same because they have a huge monthly nut to make. You see a lot of new fusion and tapas restaurants, as well as high end boutiques.

Cupertino has a bunch of really good Chinese restaurants, there's a great dim sum place in Daly City, and Fremont is known for good Afghani food, and there's one place in Belmont that is also good Afghani food. And there's a great Japanese kaiseki place in San Mateo, and good ramen near downtown San Mateo, and a good sushi place in San Bruno.

Downside is that you do need a car though.

I find it really interested to hear this sort of thing - how two people experiencing the same thing have completely different views. For context, I moved to near San Jose from Cambridge (UK) and love where I live.

I have friends in SF paying the same rent for way less space. I can drive to surf or mountain bike in 30 mins and it’s not too bad to go ski. I can keep a motorbike in my garage along with my car, and a desk and computer to hack about with electronics. I’m six miles from work and can ride a motor or leg bike to work, or drive, or get a Lyft if I’ve had some beers in the pubs that are near my office. There’s tonnes of restaurants of all sort nearby and a number of bars and restaurants 10-30 mins walk away. I can get to SF in about an hour, thought most concerts I want to see are in Berkeley which is a bit further. If even that’s not enough, I’m 15 minutes from SJC so can get to anywhere in the world about as easily as it’s possible for anyone to. Houses are low and flat, but the diversity of styles and the care put into people gardens (the smell of the flowers!) is wonderful. There are three free libraries where people have installed book shelves and benches in their front yards for people to stop by. My town has a few parks that are always full of people, and I can bike to others if I feel like it on the weekend. There’s a store for anything I want within 20 mins. Despite what the article says, towns do have a sense of there and identity, it’s just more diffuse and less obvious.

I’m not trying to take away anything from people who prefer to live in SF, but there’s a lot of us who live in the valley proper and love it here. The meme that there’s nothing of value here and fun comes to San Jose to die seems very popular on the internet.

I think "cultural wasteland" is stretching it a bit. A big part of culture is food, and SV is anything but a wasteland when it comes to food.

How do you talk about Silicon Valley without mentioning Stanford and Berkeley, without mentioning the defense industry which preceded it? The writer doesn't even get the Gertrude Stein quote right. She was writing about her childhood home, the house she had grown up in, that it had been torn down. [1] Traffic. We have traffic. Who doesn't?

What drivel.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/there_is_no_there_there

> How do you talk about Silicon Valley without mentioning Stanford and Berkeley

Because it is a relatable hajj to tech Mecca that many others will experience for the first time, in the same context that this writer experienced it.

SV has been around for 50+ years. I think what the writer is seeing now is destination rather than destiny. I think the writer's first impressions now are really overblown as any sort of analysis.

I find it relatable and find your being bothered by it to be unrelatable

It comes across like you are married to the area and its history in a way that the heavily transient population derives zero benefits in caring about

Whatever ship you are defending sailed long ago and also is not what the article is about

If I want a primer to tell people what they’ll experience, this is an article to encapsulate all that

If I want a museum, this isnt the article for it

Simple

The descriptions in this article can be generalized to describe almost any American city that grew in the automobile age. Wide streets, large highways, strip malls with parking lots, a landscape truly designed with the car as the first-class citizen. I frequent the Bay Area, and in fact, it feels quite dense compared to where I live (a major Texas city).

https://outline.com/P5yRJC

Finding this hilariously apt, mainly because I live in a similar place, but don't use a car, hence I've been in a position to notice what others tend to ignore: Wherever you are (not just SV), the automobile does create a culture (and it's not necessarily the one in the ads).

Funny to see the same orthodoxy of unamed articles also applies to personnal takes at The Economist.

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