“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.