This is a very valid point that almost nobody makes, and I still cannot understand why not. People screaming about how unaffordable the Bay Area is, seem to feel like living elsewhere would be some kind of death sentence.
1. There are some specialized types of jobs in the software industry where there are only a small handful of employers and where most of those employers are located in Silicon Valley. There are some areas in the software industry, such as web development and enterprise software, where there are plenty of jobs outside Silicon Valley and similar tech hubs. Plenty of businesses need custom applications, and the Microsoft software stack of Windows Server, SQL Server, .NET, Azure, and other products is commonly used outside of Silicon Valley, which seems to be focused on Linux. But suppose you work in the area of compilers, or you're an operating systems developer. The chances of moving to a place that isn't a tech hub and finding a compiler or operating systems development job is lower than finding a web development or Microsoft enterprise app development position. My line of work is in research in systems and AI, and it would be difficult for me to me to find similar work in most American metro areas outside of the Bay Area, Seattle, Austin, and New York, all of which (except for Austin) are expensive.
2. The Bay Area is famous for its acceptance of diverse cultures, lifestyles, and worldviews. The Bay Area's cosmopolitan atmosphere is one of my favorite aspects of living in the area. However, cosmopolitan urban areas in the United States tend to be expensive. New York, Boston, Seattle, and Los Angeles are still expensive places, even if they are not as expensive as the Bay Area. An exception to the correlation between cosmopolitanism and expense is Sacramento, a very diverse place which by California standards is also still affordable despite rising housing prices. I would not mind living there, but it's a very long commute to Silicon Valley, and there are not many jobs in my subfield of systems and AI research in the Sacramento area. If I couldn't live in or near a diverse, cosmopolitan area, my next preference would be a tourist town with a nice, laid-back atmosphere, such as many of the towns on the Central Coast of California. But, once again, those areas lack the jobs I want.
But not all tech companies in Silicon Valley pay Facebook/Google levels of compensation. There are plenty of engineers in Silicon Valley who make low six-figure salaries (i.e., $100K-$150K) and who don't own five or six figures worth of stock. I fall in this category. While we can afford to rent apartments in Silicon Valley, buying a house within an hour commute from Silicon Valley in a safe neighborhood is definitely a stretch goal for us. If I want to buy at my current salary, it's either a 2-bedroom condo in South San Jose or in Alameda County, or it's a long commute from exurbs such as Tracy and Hollister.
Now, San Diego is much more affordable and would be a very appealing option for me since the housing prices are within reach, perhaps not in places like La Jolla, but in places a little further away like Oceanside and Escondido. I wouldn't mind relocating to either one of those places.
Salaries will become lower because there will be too much supply, as dev people will flock in. Conversations will become a lot less interesting because S/N ratio will decrease.
There will be less benefit from living in the Valley if you are one of the very best (if you make a salary in top 10% of the dev jobs, you are not concerned with the rents now, it is you who DRIVE the rents to where they are), and more benefit if you aren't so good.
VC will also have a much higher pool of founders to pick from. Non-funded founders are poor, many can't go to the Valley now, they will. VCs will get picky, and deals will become worse for everyone. Valley will just get watered down.
As for salaries the point of Silicon Valley as a selling point is to try to pay for quality - a fixed housing SV would still be more expensive than generic office in a generic town or outsourcing to cheaper still.
Also, it’s weird to say that with more people moving in it will lower the amount of competent people. That’s not necessarily true and there’s no evidence that the influx of people will affect the ratio of what it is now.
Being away from the valley has allowed me to recognize how odd most of the people there are and how much it’s affected my own thinking during my stay there. Elitist thinking like this runs rampant and when you move to other places you’ll see the people in the Bay Area aren’t all that elite after all.
1. specialized jobs. True, and you will miss out on some career options, as this is the center of the world for tech by far. But nowadays there are remote work possibilities in many areas and the lower cost of living as well as much lower taxes outside CA make up for higher salaries in the bay area (remote work jobs tend to pay a bit less).
2. "Diversity". Meh, you can find all the diversity/culture you need in any decently sized city. My closest friends have been from Eastern Europe/balkans and I find those guys wherever I go. Whatever you are into, you'll find it, but you just have to seek it out. It's like people who rave about being in a town with so many art galleries and symphonies, but they don't actually attend said galleries or symphonies. And most people can't tell the difference between the Santa Fe symphony and the SF Symphony, TBH. Sure, it's a step down, but you will get all the culture you need. In terms of tolerance, the bay area is not what I would call tolerant -- it's a pretty authoritarian place. Try wearing a MAGA hat to work and see how tolerant they are. I'm not talking about getting dirty looks, odds are good you will get physically assaulted. Having lived here for a while, I've seen the transition from a quirky place with a strong libertarian bent and that likes to experiment to one that is more of a monoculture constantly looking for something to be outraged about, and the overton window for what is tolerated is shrinking every day. Even a lot of the old style hippies which I used to hang out with have moved out, many heading to Portland or TX. Oddly, places like Palo Alto and Cupertino are much more tolerant of other worldviews. A good rule of thumb is that if you can find a neighborhood with a thriving pentecostal church, a presbyterian church, a catholic church, and a synagogue all in reasonable proximity, then you have truly discovered a place where there is diversity of opinions and worldviews. Also, if the state isn't deep blue or deep red, then there is some diversity of worldviews. Most people, however, only pretend to want that. What they want is to be surrounded by those who share their values, which is completely understandable. You can find that and lower cost of living in many places.
3. Don't overlook walkability and nice, old fashioned architecture. This is huge. It's the best thing San Francisco has going for it -- human scale architecture combined with density. That's the one thing you will miss the most. There are so many benefits from not needing a car, not only health benefits, but mental health benefits. Despite all the problems with homelessness in the city, which have gotten much worse over the years, there many nice walkable neighborhoods, as well as nice staircase hikes, viewspots. It's lovely.
In terms of places to look at, there are lots of nice places that, in my opinion, would provide much higher standards of living.
1. Miami/beach places in Florida.
2. Small towns on the east coast, like Asheville, Charleston, Charlottesville.
3. Washington DC is underrated, but also expensive and there are crime issues. But not as pricey as SF.
4. Chicago has low cost of living if you can put up with the cold. Crime issues tend to be isolated to bad neighborhoods so the headlines aren't as bad. One thing to be aware of is the horrible state finances in Illinois -- high income people are going to be soaked, so caveat emptor.
5. Although NY is expensive, Long Island is relatively inexpensive still.
6. The entire desert southwest is awesome -- New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, are all gorgeous states with wonderful cities. Take a look at Flagstaff, Arizona.
7. New Hampshire is underrated, if you can take the cold.
For walkability, which is key for me, one option is to find a small town -- those tend to be walkable. It needs to be not dead and close to a big town. Access to healthcare is a real issue in small towns, so you will end up driving to big towns to see your doctor.
DC the city is nice for the most part; crime and rough areas are concentrated mostly in South East DC. The DC suburbs are literally the overall richest counties (Loudoun VA, Fairfax VA, PGC Maryland, etc.). Lot of tech around there, in those 'burbs, but also expensive. To unlock the SF-FAANG level salaries around DC you need to do cleared work -- with all the headaches that security clearances imply.
Really liked Salt Lake City, Utah. Mormon presence is lower compared to other parts of the city and a beer isn't too expensive. Weather and people are nice.
Heard good things about Boise.
"We've got ours, everyone else can bugger off" is a political position subject to debate, not a property of the universe.
The risk is what happens when that job is done and you find yourself in the boonies with no meaningful tech work within hundreds of miles?
I was at Sun during the era when they made a big push to get people to give up their offices (save on real estate) and go remote, work from anywhere! It was so tempting to move to Hawaii and keep the silicon valley salary. I'm glad I didn't. I know many people who did. When Sun was over, they found themselves owning farmland in the middle of nowhere, no job and no possibility of getting one in the area.
North America is vast and largely empty. This is a planning issue in that cities allow this sort of demand to grow unchecked.
I lived there for several years and got out, and it’s really nice to be living somewhere I know I won’t spend half the year with a little voice in the back of my head suggesting suicide as the solution to every other problem because I am tragically low on sunlight and vitamin D even with a 2’ square sun lamp and lots of pills, and I see the symptoms of the same shit in the friend I’m talking about who ended up there after SF’s insane rents pushed him out.
Sure we admire their ingenuity and hard-work ethic and how they recovered the land from the sea but that same energy probably could have been applied with more productive results somewhere else. Look what the Mormons have done with Utah. Maybe the Dutch could have done something similar with Montana (or even Minnesota). I'm certain they would have done a better job with San Francisco than we've done.
But on a brighter note, trust me, there’s a lot of great places in the US! Many people from around the world immigrate to America to make it and I think those who are lucky enough to be able to stay in America due to citizenships (just cause you happened to be born on American soil) or via the Visa lottery should be grateful for the opportunities that they have.
It's not an issue of building out, or even necessarily of building up, but just allowing and/or encouraging more building and allowing some building to replace existing low-density housing.
I've lived an hour North of SF my entire life. I've seen how housing policies affects SF as well as where I live (which is also very expensive, but not quite to the same level). People don't like to allow too much change into a neighborhood because it changes the nature of the community. News flash, so does allowing housing prices to double or triple over a couple decades. The only difference is that the existing land owners get to capitalize on that, so it's not just about change, it's also about people controlling the flow of benefits of an area to maximize their own benefits.
My inability to not afford housing in the places that I want to live in are not an outcome based on “efficient markets”.
The cost of housing in major American cities is largely determined by whether they can build more housing to meet demand and lower costs. The new housing is blocked most often by people who already live there.
So now the question is how different groups with opposing interests might apply power to get their desired outcome.
I can’t live in Monte Carlo, for example, even though it looks quite lovely. And I accept that, because that’s how reality works.
He simply needs to take the personal responsibility to make it achievable vs capitulate to some strange reasoning of "it's not my fault I can't afford it, it's their fault because XYZ".
The question is whether the people who cook my food, do my laundry, plumb my home, deliver seltzer to my bodega, butcher chicken in my grocery store should be able to afford to live within a reasonable distance of my home. We can choose to build cities that make it nearly impossible for them to do so and for them to live in constant fear of homelessness (with many eventually sliding into it) or we can build ones where they can comfortably afford a modest home.