Hacker News Reader

Comment by xtiansimon | Hacker News Reader

Maybe all the tech companies should leave SF for San Jose. It has an airport. And SJ isn’t so precious about it’s history.

View on HN

There are also other places than California. Just sayin.

There are a lot more states than California....

Clearly the demand for CA living indicates how people feel about those other states.

It’s not like everyone is clamoring to live in say, Georgia.

It is like people are whining because their “six figure salaries” can’t buy a decent house in California when you can get a 3100 square foot brand new build for $2100 a month with less than $10K down, in a great school district in metro Atlanta.

Markets reveal preferences. The differences in prices reflect the dollar votes cast in the marketplace. Whining doesn't affect markets-- participation does.

Isn’t the problem that the people who are complaining can’t “participate” because all of the current homeowners don’t want new houses built?

Hundreds of new housing units are sold every year in San Francisco. (Edit: the actual number appears to be 4,700 for 2019, which is actually lower than previous years)

And yet people still complain how about their 250K+ salaries can’t afford them a home....

250k/yr is about enough to buy a median-priced home in San Francisco

https://www.hsh.com/finance/mortgage/salary-home-buying-25-c...

Fair enough. And $200K is still more than a “software Engineer IV” makes in San Francisco on average.

https://swz.salary.com/SalaryWizard/Software-Engineer-IV-Sal...

And let’s be honest. $1,050,000 “the median house price” doesn’t get you much.

https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/

Slow your roll. Markets are fine for business. Not for families. Tell you kid you'll make it up to them in Q4. ;P

there's a lot of people who don't want to leave their families. That doesn't mean they want to be in CA.

San Jose can be in SF in ~1hr, so commuters from SF can get there for work. haha

People want to live in SF because it's cool.

A lot of people who work at Facebook and Google would still rather live in SF and commute 2-3 hrs roundtrip each day rather than live in Menlo Park/Mountain View (or surrounding cities).

Tech companies are going to start where the talent is, and a bulk of that talent want to live in SF.

Is it really still cool? So much of the authentic character has evaporated away, compared to the mid 90’s. I’m curious what people consider an authentic San Francisco experience in 2019.

Market Street circa 6th to 3rd, thanks for asking. What kind of a dysfunctional municipal administration allows this and for what reason?

IMHO, the politics has created an industry of homelessness. SROs or other business are created by political fiat to cater and keep people homeless.

Even if SF exists purely as a simulacra of it's past, cool self, it's still leagues ahead anything offered in the south bay.

I lived in cupertiuno for 2 years and you could cut off all my fingers and I could still count how many times my friends that live in the city would rain CalTrain south to come visit me.

I'd say that factual thing to focus on is density of people. If you apply Metcalfe's law to IRL connections of people you just meet out and about, it's very appealing for those working on a startup and being stuck on a problem. You very often accidentally run into people in SF that can either help with that problem, or fund you so that you can work on it longer. Just this afternoon at an SF Museum, I ran into 2 investors with a net worth both north of $50 million. This simply hasn't happened in the East Bay (more middle class than wealthy people), nor down the Peninsula (not dense enough).

You're thinking about this wrong. You needed new friends from Willow Glen, Alma-Almaden neighborhood or Los Gatos. When I lived there, peeps would make the hike from Santa Cruz, too. Community is where you make it. Don't expect the world to change for you, be the change.

San Francisco largely stopped being a happening place more than 50 years ago. What's remained is the perception.

What are you basing that on?

    > what people consider an 
    > authentic San Francisco 
    > experience in 2019

(U+1F4A9) 💩

(HN isn't compatible with the authentic San Francisco experience...)

It's not cool, it's "cool". Gentrifiers chasing the mystique and destorying it when they show up.

I don't like that word, 'cool'. Everyone uses it for everything--meaningless. Cool died September 28, 1991 in Santa Monica, CA.

It is also walkable and it has a nice geography. As opposed to the valley which is flat and built for cars. I am mostly a loner but I also lived in SF and commuted in because of those reasons.

Unlike SF, SJ is actually height-limited due to the airport. (Not that's it's fully built right now)

Like SF, most buildings in SJ are much, much shorter than the tallest existing buildings in the respective city.

SJ has an immense amount of densification potential, should it choose to exercise it. The housing stock is even more sparse than SF.

I've long marvelled at why Oakland rather than SF is not the natural hub of the SF Bay Area. It has everything SF lacks: indigenous water (EBMUD), a working port, space, improved climate (still gets fog, but not as socked in as SF), transporation (highways, BART, airport), a major technical university at its doorstep (Cal), and bedroom communities at its back (MorInDette, Walnut Creek, Pleasant Hill, Concord), as well as the east-bay communities to the south, and a direct BART link to downtown San Jose (as of quite recently).

But somehow it's SF, PA, MV, and Santa Clara that own tech.

The reason for that is that is Santa Clara and Stanford Universities. IBM and and cold war era defense contractors.

The reason SF and not Oakland is simple racism.

So, Stanford, obviously.

But ... what's Santa Clara University's significance? It's always seemed a minor local school to my knowledge.

If anything, SJ State would be a bigger factor, turning out armies of technical and applied (rather than theoretical) engineers.

I think the OP was focusing on Santa Clara the city/county not the university. Either way my understanding is that the aerospace industry was the root of the tech industry and was based out of the South Bay, notably Moffett field. I wonder if land was also not just insanely cheap in the South Bay in the 60’s when all this got going.

Also Fairchild semiconductor was in Sunnyvale and was a hub for a lot of the following Silicon Valley development. Finally William Shockley moved to Mountain View to be closer to his ailing mother and founded Shockley semiconductor.

These are all why peninsula and not Oakland, but SF vs SJ I am less clear on. When I moved to the bay about 13y ago the center of tech was on the peninsula but people were starting to look to SF. I think the refocus north is relatively more recent.

Land was vastly cheaper on the Penninsula & south bay generally, yes. Most especially than San Francisco. It was both denser and had more opportunities for expansion at the same time than Marin. Why the South Bay won out over the East Bay (Mare Island Naval Base, Concord Naval Weapons Station, Alameda Air Base), I'm not entirely sure, though Stanford and Terman and electronics and that whole history (see Steve Bank's "Secret History of Silicon Valley" https://steveblank.com/secret-history/) likely had something to do with that.

Then Shockley, and Intel, and we're off to the races.

The move to SF is definitely more recent. South Park, Reddit, and Twitter led much of that.

  Finally William Shockley moved to Mountain View to be closer to his ailing mother and founded Shockley semiconductor.

No, Shockley preceded Fairchild Semi. The latter was founded by the "traitorous eight" who fled Shockley.

Santa Clara University is a private Jesuit university.

SF had the working port until the era of containerization, and that plus inertia drove pretty much everything else.

SF had a working port, but because of rail access, Oakland was the preferred hub.

Until the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge was built, railcars were ferried across the Bay (though yes, the Peninsula SP lines also existed, and have some interesting corporate legal landmark case history and shenanigans). Then, after the tracks were torn up for the lower-deck reverse auto flow, Oakland and Richmond served as the principle railyards on the East Bay, for the Santa Fe.

I don't know what port tonnage compared across the years in SF and Oakland, but I'd be surprised if Oakland hadn't surpassed SF at least during WWII, if not before.

> During the decade between 1921 and 1931, the ports in Oakland and San Francisco both experienced explosive growth in commercial shipping, although the pace of growth favored Oakland. Prior to 1927 (when the Port of Oakland was formally organized), shipping tonnage in San Francisco more than doubled that in Oakland. By 1921 [sic] the gap had narrowed: Oakland handled about three-quarters the tonnage of San Francisco. Oakland's port would continue to outgrow San Francisco's through World War II before overwhelming it during the 1950s and 1960s.

Source: A Tale of Two Bridges, p. 20, https://books.google.com/books?id=XiyVDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT20

Thanks!

Pier 80 in SF is actually used today, for roll-on, roll-off cargo like cars (Teslas are shipped from there)

MorInDette? I lived in Lafayette. Never heard that... you’re talking Lamorinda right?

Yes.

Is it intentional to sound like "more in debt"?

Most of SF has a 45 foot height limit :\

Glen Park, a neighborhood near multiple rapid transit lines, has an even lower 40ft limit for the commercial area near the BART station.

Look in California SB-50: https://sf.curbed.com/2019/5/10/18563360/senate-bill-50-char...

Only a fraction of San Jose is subject to airport height restrictions. And even in the downtown area most buildings are shorter than the limit.

Indeed. I wonder why there isn't more visible startup activity in SJ. Is it purely cultural/historical, where it emerged in SF and that remains the main regional attractor?

Or are there other political/zoning reasons that make SF more attractive? I believe SF is giving some rich companies discounts to keep them around and reap (I assume) local taxes?

Can you give some comparison baselines to an uninformed East coaster? I thought SJ is part of the Bay Area and part of the skyrocketing housing cost crisis. Is that not true? If not what is an East coast analogy - e.g. Boston is to NYC what SF is to SJ?

I knew a number of people who moved to the SV area, got FAANG type jobs way down in the Valley, and yet still chose to live in SF enduring hellish commutes. I never could quite understand why.

It's something very roughly and geographically like if SF is DC, then SJ is Baltimore. You could theoretically commute between them, but it's quite impractical.

SJ is part of the Bay Area and absolutely has skyrocketing costs; it usually tops the lists of cities with the fastest growing housing prices.

When I got a job in Redwood City (in between the two), I thought about moving there from SF, but found the costs to be about the same to live there versus SF.

So I stayed in SF; it's definitely the anchor of culture of the Bay Area. For everything outside of work it's a much better place to be (for me, a single queer person, especially). I since got a job in SF and have no intention to move or work south again.

In fact, the general trend has been for companies to move towards SF away from the peninsula, but mostly because it's where workers want to be. It's much more easier to get by without a car in the city than in the peninsula, it has much better clubs/nightlife, etc. For a young person, the city (meaning SF) is often much more appealing, though of course different people have different preferences.

Communting SJ-SF is, unfortunately, doable and done. It's an hour drive off-peak on 280, or about the same time (though crowded and being pinned dead on a rail timetable) by CalTrain express. Off-peak rail runs 90 minutes, and you've still got terminal-to-endpoint to deal with, which is problematic in both SF (improved with the Transbay Terminal), and SJ (residential regions sprawl for miles from the principle train stations).

It is also done to commute from Baltimore to DC; for me it's just way too much. Redwood City was my limit and I really hated it, even with my motorcycle. I know there's a Google Bus from very near to me all the way to Sunnyvale, but I considered that still unacceptable.

Of course, late at night I once did SF-SJ in 45 minutes. Having tried every solution at all times of day (e.g., biking to the caltrain, carpooling, etc) the "big bike" always wins; truly off peak the car is just as fast, in theory (and, hey, safer and more comfortable... but less fun).

But, let's be honest all the solutions are stressful and sucky. You can trade time for stress to a certain extent, but you're spending a lot of both no matter what.

Oh, absolutely on "stressful and sucky".

But far from theoretical.

I'd not recommend it.

Interesting. So if SJ does not seem to have the NIMBY cohort putting on the brakes for development, and has plenty of high-rises and other housing, and the prices are still sky-high - does that indicate that maybe more housing in SF is not going to help things as much as people usually think at first?

Of course. Density begets density. Housing is just like highways, add more, and demand will catch up.

NYC is way more dense than the Bay Area. It’s not exactly a cheap place to live.

Not sure who downvoted you, but yes. More housing requires more businesses in the area to due to spending of the residents, which in turn creates jobs, which in turn creates housing demand.

There are plenty of NIMBYs in the San Jose area and there is not a lot of high-rise housing. Both San Jose and San Francisco have median house prices over a million dollars, but you get more house for your money in San Jose and apartment rents are a lot cheaper (and the apartments generally come with parking, which you'll need because public transit is a joke).

I think the issue might be that plenty of people live in SJ relative to the amount of housing available, and so it's expensive just like SF, but it's far less developed / more sprawling, so there's less slack in the system for office space for small companies and fewer apartments for young workers.

> yet still chose to live in SF enduring hellish commutes. I never could quite understand why.

I grew up in the South Bay. I can answer that question.

The South Bay is eye bleedingly BORING by design. It's an absolutely terrible place for a teenager or young adult. Most of the fun stuff in the city is illegal in the south bay.

It’s illegal in San Francisco too, just more widely tolerated.

San Francisco (and Oakland) are the only real dense urban areas. The rest of the Bay Area is a suburb. San Jose is mostly houses and shopping centers.

Most of the young people I know who work in tech want to live in or near San Francisco -- it has nightlife, restaurants, cultural events, etc. This is especially the case for people who are not from the Bay Area originally. When they start looking into buying property or having children a lot of them leave San Francisco and move closer to the suburbs.

Oakland is the Bronx. SF is Queens. There is no Manhattan or Brooklyn. San Jose is central New Jersey.

(This comparison is unfair to both Queens and the Bronx, mind you.)

San Francisco is the best you can do if you want a walkable lifestyle on the evenings/weekends and work in Silicon Valley. (Oakland/Berkeley are more interesting and more affordable but/because the commute is unendurable.) The SF to SV commute is mostly against the flow, so getting to Page Mill Road takes about the same time from Mountain View (next suburb over) as from southern parts of SF.

Probably because noone wants to live in San Jose

Someone seems to want to live there.

Population of San Jose: 1.0 million.

Population of San Francisco: 880k.

eh. San Jose is a sprawling amalgamation of a dozen towns that encloses 2 airports. SF is a fraction of the size.

Are you counting the small one on Tully Road, in addition to SJC?

>...it emerged in SF...

It didn't emerge in SF. Quite the contrary, virtually all tech startups for most of the Bay Area's history were no farther north than Menlo Park, and often much farther south (Netflix was founded in Scotts Valley). That's why YC was headquartered in Mountain View until recently.

SF only became a startup hub within the last decade, IMHO in response to the desire of Millenials to live in urban environments.

> I wonder why there isn't more visible startup activity in SJ.

Because VCs are mostly investing in software startups with twentysomething who are stupid enough to believe the hype. Those who believe hype want to live in the "cool" area, and that's San Francisco or Berkeley--not San Jose.

Those people building real businesses don't care, and probably aren't even located in the valley anymore.

The term "Silicon Valley" originally referred to the Santa Clara Valley, which is where San Jose is. Most of the original Bay Area tech companies are there -- Intel, AMD, Apple, Cisco, etc., also newer large companies like Netflix and Google. The startup scene in SF is more recent.

Startup activity did in fact not emerge in SF. Silicon Valley was traditionally the Santa Clara valley area (roughly, San Jose/Los Gatos to Palo Alto/Menlo Park). There were no tech jobs in SF (outliers aside, of course), it was a hippy city an hour north of Silicon Valley.

It it only during the present decade that startup activity has appeared in force in SF, away from Silicon Valley. Due largely (I believe) to the tax breaks SF created in 2011 to encourage that.

South of Market was cheap, starting in the early 1990s. Startups back then liked cheap.

The center of Silicon Valley oscillates between SF and SJ on a roughly 10-year cycle, corresponding to major technology generations (and loosely, to bubble/build cycles). It was around Redwood City in the early 1970s (Ampex, Oracle), moved to Palo Alto and Cupertino for the PC/workstation era in the late 70s (Sun, Cisco, Apple, Seagate) down as far as San Jose and even Scotts Valley during the 80s (Adobe, Memorex, Borland), started moving north to Mountain View in the early 90s (SGI, Netscape), moved back to SF for the dot-com boom, moved back south to Palo Alto and Mountain View in the late 90s (Yahoo, Paypal, Google, Facebook, YCombinator), then moved back to SF starting in 2006 and significantly accelerating in 2011 (Reddit, AirBnB, Stripe, Twitter, Zynga, Medium, etc.) It's still in SF, though it remains to be seen where the next technology generation will take hold or if it'll even be in the Bay Area.

I see a lot of building in downtown RWC and San Carlos. Maybe won’t be the center, but definitely a significant uptick.

You're comparing Medium to Adobe. Wow.

Shuttle busses allowed techies to live in SF and work in places like Google, Facebook, etc. Prior to shuttles, it was a huge pain to do the commute. As they left big tech companies, they faced the choice of doing the commute again, or joining/starting companies in SF. I think this is an underrated factor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com