The Three Bay Areas (2017) | Hacker News Reader

The Three Bay Areas (2017)

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198 pointsmdu9686 comments

I enjoyed this. I probably read it in 2017 but it carries new meaning given the new vectors of disparity. Of these caricatures of late 20-somethings, two are likely now out of work and dealing with a whole new set of problems. The third mostly complains about having to work from home and how food delivery is less reliable than it used to be.

This ignores a huge chunk of the bay area: first generation tech immigrants. Not working class, not elites, not hip.

I don’t think the article is supposed to be a description of every small class of people in the Bay Area. I think it is merely to give an impression of the inner lives of some different people in roughly the same place. Certainly I didn’t read it as “here are representatives of the three sets which partition the population of the Bay Area” so much as “here is what the Bay Area means to three different stereotypes of people I’ve met”

Sure, but as a first generation tech immigrant, it made me feel transparent and ignored, since living in the south bay it feels like we are the majority or at least the single largest group.

EDIT: Also, the title is The Three Bay Areas, not "A Tale of Three Bay Areas" or alike.

This was my take away as well, esp since the article uses "The" in the title, which connotates completeness of the coverage.

To a certain type of person living here (possibly exclusively spending time in SF proper?), first generation immigrants are invisible or "don't count".

Please don’t obsess about this, especially online. You play into the stereotype of the Bay Area as some latter-day 19th Century Boston, which was described in that era as "applying first principles to trifles". Forget it, kid, it’s Chinatown. Or not.

There are loads of different kinds of people in the Bay Area who aren't on that list. The title vaguely suggests it's a complete census, and indeed it isn't, but as long as you read it as three hopefully interesting sketches of some people you might meet, perhaps it's not too bad.

"The Three Little Pigs" is not about the only three little pigs that exist in the entire world. This is just how titles work.

Sure, but there are 8+ million people in the Bay Area, so a short piece about three types of people is never going to cover everyone. I'm a Bay Area native, and none of these profiles are anywhere close to describing me.

I also live in the South Bay, and "first generation tech immigrants" are definitely not a majority, though that certainly does describe a lot of people. While tech companies are most of the largest employers, employment in retail, health care, education, hospitality and local government are still significant portions of the working base.

I am fairly certain that this was written from the perspective of people who were born and raised in the Bay Area, which first generation tech immigrants by definition cannot be.

It’s also a whimsical satire piece, so I wouldn’t expect it to include every group. That said, note the the site has follow on stories for each group, so maybe they expanded the groups.

The second one was from Sacramento, which isn’t the Bay Area... and the first one suggest two places they were born that are on the east coast.

My reading was:

- friends moved to Sac because it’s cheaper.

- some folks went to university on the east coast.

Maybe I missed some details.

plus even if they were from sac, that's basically the east bay. its one hour driving on I-80 from davis to oakland (which is shorter than a lot of people's commute)

It is way more than an hour during commute times.

its around 2 hours

If you're a transplant working in tech in SF you're pretty close to elite. The background growing up might not fit, but the lifestyle in SF does.

There are two reasons I'm guessing the author doesn't see himself as part of the working class. 1. He doesn't make fun of the working class like he does to the other two. Either because he doesn't know them well enough to do so, or because he doesn't want to insult them. 2. The UAW locals in the Bay Area represent graduate students, postdocs, and nonprofit workers. No one in "service jobs or government jobs" or "nurses, teachers or craftsmen."

Tons of UAW members see themselves as teachers. That’s essentially what a humanities PhD or post-doc have to do to attend university.

Many journalist types are the first group playing in the second group. It's hard to make it otherwise.

Or just the second group. It is described as downwardly mobile already.

3. Oil is not something that you can change in your own car unless you're ready to permanently ruin whatever concrete you do it on. Sounds like the author gets their car maintained with an app. ;)

Thats just not true at all. All that means is that you're slow and forget to move your oil pan from underneath your oil drain to underneath the filter.

Then again I was raised by a single immigrant mom. I was taught to pinch pennies in ways many people cannot relate to.

Four Yorkshiremen.

What?

I’ve changed my oil on the side of the road many times. (No garage) If the car is raised enough, you don’t even need a jack. Oil drain pan and some paper towels is all you need beyond basic tools.

If anything - you sound like you get your oil changed with an app...

just put some cardboard down and you're fine

I don’t know about these stereotypes. In my own case, I grew up and went to college in the southeast, moved here for the tech, food, nature, and sunshine, and totally ignore everything political because I’m slightly conservative which makes me feel like an alien around here. Will probably move back at some point to be closer to family but I’m not thrilled about losing the sunshine and nature.

    You order your groceries via app. You make restaurant 
    reservations via app. You have your laundry picked up via 
    app. You manage your investments via app. You have casual 
    sex via app. You refill your Xanax prescription via app.

modern (American) Psycho

I was thinking Dorsia.

How did you manage to get a reservation?!

Great sea urchin ceviche!

This feels kind of like the article equivalent of a political cartoon: sure, it's accurate and worth a chuckle if you squint at it from a distance, but it's been done to death and I'm unsure if it's a productive portrait outside of the instinct to say "lol sooooo true!"

I have definitely met tons of individuals in SF/Oakland who fit these stereotypes. Also, the individuals I met who resemble the second stereotype are the most inconsistent in terms of ideals. They want to be rich, but they’d rather accrue “moral capital”. It’s quite the oxymoron.

They want to be rich, but they’d rather accrue “moral capital”. It’s quite the oxymoron.

Who doesn’t want to be rich, given the chance? We’re crabs in a bucket, we’re just too evolved to admit it.

I struggle with this idea as a consequence of growing up among conflicting ideas. Will I send my kids to public school to do our part to avoid further segregation of schools, or send them to private school because we can afford to and they’ll get better teachers? There’s a name for this: opportunity hoarding. It’s a contributor to inequality in the US. But that doesn’t lessen the internal conflict.

An exploration (from the days of the 2600) of having dollar-denominated capital while seeking mellow capital (uphill): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Serial

As someone who grew up in the Bay I find it curious to make the distinction that there are three.

There's South Bay, East Bay, North Bay and the Peninsula.

They're all very different, but lumping in the Peninsula with the South Bay feels hamhanded given that most of the South Bay IS NOT like the Peninsula.

It's kind of an in-joke that nobody actually knows where Silicon Valley is.

The article isn't at all about three geographical bay areas, it's about three socioeconomic bay areas. I see elements of all three (but mostly the third) in my neighborhood in SF.

The article, of course, completely misses the stereotypes of people in the Peninsula and South Bay.

I suspect it's because the author is a 20something who doesn't go anywhere the BART won't take him.

By the way, what are the peninsula stereotypes? I know a few people in redwood but it seems mostly like the same stereotypes, but I really dont know that much about the area.

Yeah, I'm confused about this. I live on the peninsula and I have no idea what kind of person I apparently am.

Well, there are the rich Asians moving south from SF for better weather (the fog belt ends right where property values pick up in Millbrae). Then there are the rich whites moving north to Palo Alto to escape the sprawl of San Jose/Sunnyvale/Mountain View. Said sprawl is mostly vanilla suburban, middle-class families who work in corporate tech. Also new transplants filling in cheaper apartments, as I once was, not cool enough or paid enough to live in SF. Then you have the hard-working and long-time Latino communities getting squeezed in the middle (Redwood City and San Mateo) or pushed into the fog belt (Daly City). There is a bit of the social angst and class-conflict mentioned in the original article, but nowhere near as much--I found the south bay and the peninsula to be much more down-to-earth.

And it's also changed so much. I grew up in Sunnyvale and the Silicon Valley of my youth (80s-dot com bust) are so different from now. I'm guessing there's a drastically different view of the place based on both your age and when you first moved to SV.

I agree on the geolocation in the bay area being a huge factor. I grew up in the South Bay(wife grew up on the Pennisula) and where you lived made a huge difference. A person who owns a small construction business or was a mid manager in the south bay(San Jose, Santa Clara..) could be at the top of the spectrum so to speak in this article(their kids go to USC, Stanford etc,) and the same person on the pennisula would be solidly middle class(kids have to attend state school or mid-tier) due to funds). I knew friends parents who both had advanced science degrees and lived in the Pennisula(Mtn View, Palo Alto) and were forever renters due to cost of living and this was late 90's early 2000's.

> charmed by the feral chickens that roamed the streets freely.[0]

Holy shit I never thought I’d see my hometown mentioned in this context. Yes, the chickens roam old town (maybe a square mile) freely but you don’t really see them elsewhere. They are really loud though.

[0] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/2-California-towns-wh...

Ah yes, after seeing that I thought immediately Yuba City, near Wendys.

This is way too simplistic to segment the Bay Area into 3 social-economic classes. I've seen people from what the author describes but way more other types/classes of people.

Born on one coast, living on the other, I can safely say it's the same people stereotypes, just different land use.

This reads like a satirical version of Robert Putnam's book Our Kids. I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in the topic and likes their data interwoven with personal stories to bring it to life.

Do people really only know people who do what they do? Of course you expect a coder to know more coders than the normal population, and the same for doctors or any other profession.

But do you not have friends and relatives from all three of these categories? I don't even live in the Bay Area, but I have Bay Area friends and relatives in all three.

It depends:

Is your standard for friendship facebook friends, of which the average person has hundreds, or close personal friends of which the average person has 3-7?

Did they grow up where they're living, thus forming a non-work social network, or did they move there for work and find the distance made it hard to keep in touch with old friends?

Do they have interests (religion, sport clubs, parenting etc) that bring them into contact with people outside of their professional circles, and give them a chance to get to know each other?

This article is bullshit. A house in Potrero for under two million?

Give it a couple of months.

A quick Zillow search shows multiple places in Potrero that are for sale and under $2M right now. I've been casually watching the area for most of the year and there's usually a place or two available in the $1.3-$2M range at any given time.

Article was written in 2017. So maybe in 2014-ish the protagonist of Story 1 bought the house??

With all the turmoil and despair of 2020, this article made me happier than I've felt in weeks, because it reminds me of what I don't have to deal with these days.

$1.1 mil for a 2 bedroom house in Potrero is a steal.

> You are utterly certain that you are not racist, even though your friend circle is exclusively white, Asian or hapa.

I love how asians are the new whites. For all its worship of success, Americans hate success like no other.

Loosely quoted by Iris Chang in "The Chinese in America", when times are good Asians are glorified for being the "model minority" and have all the privilege that Whites have, and vilified as foreigners when times are bad.

Given the current political climate I'm worried we're swinging towards the latter.

It's awkward. I feel I'm considered a minority when it doesn't matter much (e.g., Asian cast members in a movie) but ignored when it does matter (e.g., in the conversation of racial equality, acknowledgement of different ideas and culture, political representation). My family's history is not in the books how difficult it was to even get here (many people died escaping on boats), and started here from nothing in a foreign land where people think your culture is weird. And it's awkward to speak up about those types of things because at least we aren't getting shot up on the streets (yet).

With US and China going into a cold war too, it gets more awkward, and that's even more difficult to speak up about since they're public enemy #1 here.

It'll become more obvious when Asians distinguish themselves by advertising their non-Chineseness as a defensive maneuver.

That's been fascinating to watch from the inside of tech companies as well.

I've seen instances of US-born American Asians to not fall under the "People of Color" label when referred to by Latin-American or Black employees, thus being associated more with White Americans, and yet they themselves would self-label as "People of Color" in other conversations.

My impression is that, at least in coastal metropolitan cities, East and South Asians are informally part of the white "class". Economically those two groups are more accomplished than most white ethnicities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U... , which I imagine makes other minorities less than thrilled about being affiliated with them, as they don't get to share the same levels of success.

It's almost like this is all more about interclass dynamics than skin color. But skin color is a convenient distraction and factionalism drives votes.

You can recognize the "Three" crowd on dating sites by their first sentence which is usually something like "Bay area native"

I am always amused by the people who think that being scared to move as an attribute. Yet, they hate people who have moved to where they live.

Some pretty exaggerated stereotypes. A false trichotomy?

It’s always fun to stereotype people.

Article is paywalled?

Yep. I'm paywalled out of it. Anyone want to give a summary?

This is medium's paywall. Just open an incognito tab or the like. Personally I have no guilt about it because medium doesn't pay the people who write on it.

Being from the south, I couldn't relate to anything in this article but I really enjoyed reading it. The author has a good writing style.

Is this really the trichotomy of the Bay area? I thought it was interesting that none of these groups are turned out to be Trump supporters. I think it would be fun to contrast this mode of thought with the thought of people in flyover territory, as was done with these groups.

I go out to the Bay Area often and I don’t know many people who fit into this narrative. This article may say more about the author than the Bay.

The Bay area is way more complex than this simplistic trichotomy. The north bay alone (north of Golden Gate) is completely different to the peninsula and east bay. (Marin is also very different to Sonoma county, the top of the bay area). As work/jobs have changed the blue collar San Franciscans have been squeezed out to the 'burbs and a similar situation has occurred in the south bay with people squeezed out of the suburbs to the eastern x-urbs, until recently a very long commute to work.

> Is this really the trichotomy of the Bay area?

From 10,000 ft, pretty much, although with any topic as complex as this, much nuance lost in the caricature. There are significant shades of gray between these three broad groups. I know households with blue collar workers married to doctors for example, and teachers married to property developers.

Where you really find the caricatures in this story are in households where all the workers are either highly compensated or very low compensated, or somewhere in between.

> Is this really the trichotomy of the Bay area? I thought it was interesting that none of these groups are turned out to be Trump supporters.

It's not terribly surprising though. The only population of the Bay Area who has a strong shared interest with the current POTUS is the wealthy established professional and capitalist class. Many of them still wouldn't openly support POTUS because of their disagreements on social and cultural issues - they are the "racism/homophobia is horrible but don't raise my taxes" crowd, which around here slots you a conservative Democrat.

And sure, there are xenophobes and ethno-nationalists in the Bay Area just like everywhere, but statistically there are fewer of them here than you'll find in other parts of the country more friendly to the current POTUS, so there's no point in calling them out as a major group around here.

Also lot of people in the elite group described in the article have close family "back home" that do fit the description of POTUS supporters, which is sort of a flaw of this article in that it only attributes such relationships to the blue collar class, when in fact they're quite ubiquitous. So much so that it has caused rifts between such people and their families. I am myself just such a person.

What makes you think there are fewer xenophobes and ethno-nationalists in the Bay Area than in other parts of the country?

Percentage of population that are immigrants, number of local elected officials and leaders who are immigrants or people of color, basically all the stats that index for this sort of thing.

For an example drawn from another part of the country, look at the district in Iowa that repeatedly reelected Steve King (R) to Congress, renowned and avowed xenophobe and ethno-nationalist, until he became an embarrassment.

What makes you think that any given Bay Area Congressional district would have the same number or more xenophobes than his district?

I didn't say the Bay Area was by any means perfect. The diversity here is still tainted by huge inequality, some of which falls along ethnic lines, which is what the article in part caricatures. But xenophobia isn't a major vector of the problems at this point.

So basically, being an immigrant or a PoC precludes being a xenophobe or ethno-nationalist. That's what I thought.

Being an immigrant makes you much less likely to be a xenophobe, and being a POC in the US makes you much less likely to be an ethno-nationalist. The Bay Area has a high representation of both immigrants and POCs, so statistically lower representation of xenophobes and ethno-nationalists.

However, nothing precludes an individual of either or both of those groups from being xenophobes or ethno-nationalists. This isn't inconsistent. These aren't absolute categories, but rather categories of statistical likelihood. When you are talking about the entire population of a region - there are no absolutes, just likelihoods over large numbers.

The author is painting with a broad brush but some of it does resonate with me. Realistically most people I know are a combination of two or more of those "bay areas". Although I was not from the bay area "proper" as many "true bay area people" would remind me being from the most southern town in Santa Clara county :)

Gilroy is the same distance from SF as Sacramento--and Stockton is closer. Also, Gilroy is not even in the SF Bay watershed. However, unlike many places in the Bay Area, it does boast a direct rail link to downtown SF.

Not trying to exclude you, I've lived in San Jose and on the peninsula, neither of which was worthy of being stereotyped in the original article. It's better to avoid those games anyway.

Just want to say, growing up, SF was not the center of the universe in the bay area. If anything the south bay seemed more of a draw and I spent plenty of time in San Jose, Maintain View etc.

Alameda (East Bay) went 78.7% to Clinton plus another 6.6% to third parties

Santa Clara (South Bay) went 72.2% to Clinton plus another 7.2% to third parties

San Francisco went 85.0% to Clinton, with another 5.7% to third parties

So yeah, painting a picture of three people of different economic backgrounds, it would not be illustrative to make even one of them a supporter of the current regime.

Source: https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/sov/2016-general/sov/17-pre...

Living on the Peninsula, I think I've seen 3 Trump stickers (say, within 50 miles of home) in 3.5 years. 0 flags. And you'll note, in the article, an Uncle was a Trump supporter.

Even if this article is a satire peace, it’s extremely ignorant.

What about the people that earned their keep as category one? For example I have friends who are refugees who now fit into bracket one.

This article makes it seem like category 1 are self entitled yuppie brats.

Your refugee friends probably didn't fit this intro to bracket one:

> You grew up in one of these five counties: Marin, Santa Clara, Orange, Loudoun or Westchester. You went to a private high school that cost $40,000 a year to attend, yet when you mention it, you emphasize that it “almost bankrupted your parents,” one of whom is an engineer, and the other of whom is a clinical psychologist who has written two best-selling self-help books.

Obviously this piece is not a comprehensive list of all classes of people in the Bay Area. Just 3 common tropes.

As it is satirical, it tends to narrowly bucket people.

Bracket one broadly is intended to apply to many if not most upper middle class professionals, including ones who went to top public schools. Some just happen to enter the circle later in life (their 20s rather than at birth).

Those who enter later in life may not ever quite feel at home.

The author seems to be unhappy about parents being able to pass some of their success on to their children.

If you couldn't do it, would there much motivation to succeed in the first place?

From another angle, does the movement to equalize children have any chances against those above the median (and those from below hoping to get ahead)?

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