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Comment by bognition | Hacker News Reader

It'll be very interesting to see how going remote impacts various urban centers. I can imagine that centers like Silicon Valley will be hit hard as a ton of their labor can work from anywhere. Whereas places like Boston that have a heavy bio-tech investment are harder to relocate because you need people working in physical labs.

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Silicon Valley is NOT an urban center, it is a suburban area of Santa Clara County. It is Santa Clara Valley renamed, from Palo Alto down to San Jose and a bit north to Milpitas. I don't expect the pandemic and recession to impact Silicon Valley that much. You certainly don't see it in home prices or rents, which have either remained stable or gone up.

San Francisco on the other hand is hurting. Both rents and home prices are down.

I was able to negotiate a pretty sizable rent decrease here in Palo Alto. That's a single antidote obviously, but I think that would have been impossible if covid wasn't having a significant impact on the housing market.

Depends, rents have flattened across the entire bay. They are offering 2-3 months free rent all over the place.

1 bedroom condos in downtown SF have been flooding the market and selling under listing because they’re only attractive to people who want city life and live close to the office.

Single family homes and bigger condos further from downtown have been selling when only listed for a week. Those are driven by people’s desire for more space and historic low interest rates.

I’d say overall, SF real estate is actually doing quite well.

Amazon's move earlier this year might be an early sign. They split their expansion across 6(?) different cities. I doubt society is moving away from offices or cities in the near future, but it's a whole lot easier to have teams outside the Bay.

Bay area municipalities have been making choices that degrade quality of life and could always count on tech companies paying more taxes anyway (hello housing crisis). There will be some hard decisions coming up.

a lot of SV's tax base is going to disappear

Silicon Valley also happens to be one of the biggest biotechnology hubs in the United States.

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