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Comment by seattle_spring | Hacker News Reader

> Eventually Silicon Valley will end up like Detroit, with abandoned 4-over-1 condo complexes and empty office parks where the software industry once stood.

This happened to Detroit because jobs were literally the only reason to live there. The Bay Area has amazing weather, unbelievable scenery, world-class recreation, and tons of music and culture. If the jobs of today leave, the jobs of tomorrow will replace them simply because the area itself is one of the best in the country. Detroit is a flatland nowhere in frozen tundra flyover state. "A bunch of lakes" is only going to keep an extremely small subset of people interested.

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My job is the main reason I live in San Francisco. In my opinion Colorado is much more beautiful, Boulder has a lot of the advantages of living in a big city but also so many fewer disadvantages. Personally I’m not a big fan of the kind of nature of the bay area has to offer. I grew up in the Northeast and the southeast, and I miss the huge deciduous trees and the fall-time colors. The Bay Area is pretty, but doesn’t hold a candle to the beauty of Michigan or Colorado or Tahoe in my opinion. Obviously different people have different preferences, but for every person who believes the bay area is the perfect place to live regardless of their career, there’s at least another person who doesn’t particularly like it and has their own idea of a perfect place to live.

For what its worth, I'm not from the US but I have travelled a fair bit round the US and Colorado and Boulder were some of the few places that really appealed to me.

Throwing in Tahoe kind of disproves your point because Tahoe is one of the reasons to live here, it's a very popular weekend trip.

I meant living in Tahoe. I’ve done the weekend trip from SF a few times and with the long drive, the traffic (everyone has the same idea), the cost of hotel, trying to fit everything in a couple days, etc, I find it more stressful to take a weekend trip there than I find it enjoyable. Living there would be great but calling it a perk of living in San Francisco is a bit of a stretch for me. If your criteria for a good place to live is having a beautiful place within a 4 hour drive, then a lot of the USA is included in that. I want to live in the nice, beautiful, low-stress place.

But again, it seems to be a very personal preference. Maybe for some people having the ability to drive 4 hours to get somewhere amazing is a good balance to the things they love about living in San Francisco. I don’t consider it close enough to be a factor in my opinion of SF though.

Edit: I’m not trying to get into an argument about how amazing or horrible the Bay Area is. I’m just saying that some people find it amazing but other people actually would prefer to live in (the suburbs of) Detroit or elsewhere. I have no idea the percent of people in each group, but I don’t think we should take for a given than if all big industry leaves the Bay Area, that it will still be as popular as it is today. Not everyone loves it that much.

>I want to live in the nice, beautiful, low-stress place

As long as whatever you consider nice is the same as whatever every other similarly paid white collar worker with a spouse and 1.75 kids considers nice you will never be able to get that. Those places always will be overprices and high stress.

Look at how Boston area money has shit up Cape Cod, southern Maine and NH. NYC money has shit up all of Long Island, large parts of PA, upstate and VT. CA money has shit up Colorado so bad that CO money shits all over Utah. Chicago money shits all over Wisconsin.

What you're really trying to get away from is the secondary effects of people like you (and me, and most everyone on HN). You're trying to get away from a service and tourism economy where everyone else is (somewhat rightfully) out to screw you for every dollar you're worth. Unless you have radically different tastes in what you want this will never be possible because all the other people of the same means will gravitate toward the same places.

I think you just succinctly described the root cause of my crippling depression.

>You're trying to get away from a service and tourism economy where everyone else is (somewhat rightfully) out to screw you for every dollar you're worth.

I wouldn't characterize this as someone trying to "screw" someone. It's just a consequence of demand outstripping supply, and hence the way society allocates the resources in low supply is by who can pay the highest prices.

If anyone comes up with a better way to allocate scarce resources, I'd love to know.

A big city with world-class skiing nearby is pretty rare worldwide. If you don't appreciate it that's ok but many other people do appreciate it.

I don't feel like you are being honest. Driving across the state of California is not being nearby. A 4+ hour, 200+ mile, one way drive is not nearby.

I do it maybe a dozen times a year. Most of the younger bay area people I know go at minimum once or twice every winter. It is definitely one of the perks of living here along with all the other cool nature.

Because flying to CO or somewhere like that for skiing is even more of a pain the arse than driving to Tahoe.

Tahoe is a nightmare of traffic, terrible winter-weather drivers and crowds. 20 years ago it used to be a decent getaway for the weekend. Now, not so much -- it's basically a guarantee that you're going to spend a full day driving to/from there, and gods help you if you leave friday afternoon and try to drive back on sunday -- everyone, their dog and grandma included, are going to be doing the same exact thing.

Once or twice a year is not implying accessible -- it's implying that it's inaccessible. It's somewhere that people do want to go, but the effort required to do so limits most. If it wasn't worth going, people wouldn't be trying to go every winter, and if it was reasonably easy to get to, perhaps people would go more than once or twice a winter.

Reminds me of that Grouchism:

> Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded

That's the wonder of tiny percentages of huge numbers -- they're still big numbers!

If only .01% of 35,000,000 people go to Tahoe every week, that's still 3500 people a week that are visiting. Thats a lot of cars on the road, a lot of people waiting in lines, a lot of hotel rooms and vacation rentals taken up. I made up these numbers of course, but the point is with a state like California, even a tiny fraction of the population visiting at any given time, it's still an overwhelming number of people to deal with. And its not even just Californians that go to Tahoe -- plenty of folks from other states visit, and plenty of international visitors too.

So back to

> Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded

Yep, practically speaking, a tiny fraction of people that can go to Tahoe at any time actually go -- a rounding error -- 'nobody'. But it's still too damned crowded because Tahoe can't handle the rounding error anymore.

> I do it maybe a dozen times a year

People that live in a place like Salt Lake City can hit the slopes a dozen times in 2 weeks without taking a day off of work. I know people that work at tech companies in Park City, about 3 miles from The Canyons resort. They can literally go skiing during their lunch break.

How long does it take them to get to the beach?

> The Bay Area has amazing weather, unbelievable scenery, world-class recreation, and tons of music and culture. If the jobs of today leave, the jobs of tomorrow will replace them simply because the area itself is one of the best in the country.

That's not necessarily true. Maybe the jobs go and never return, but the recreational desirability leads it more in the direction of an Aspen: more of a place for recreation than business.

Yeah, it's like if LA was to lose the entertainment industry, the Mediterranean climate alone ensures it a highly desirable place to live. And both SF and LA are major ports.

>The Bay Area has amazing weather, unbelievable scenery, world-class recreation, and tons of music and culture.

The weather will persist, but the rest are qualities of cities with large populations who have lots of disposable income.

I agree regarding music & culture. Detroit used to have awesome music, e.g. Motown Records in its heyday, and even when in decline, it was considered one of the birthplaces of techno.

And during the last gasp of rock at the beginning of the 21st century, Detroit brought us the White Stripes!

Unbelievable scenery and world-class recreation have nothing to do with being a "city with a large population." In fact, the presence of a large population center usually makes these things worse.

> tons of music and culture

High living costs and living conditions will have the starving artists that make these things you consume flock somewhere else or never move out to the Bay in the first place. Consequently the next generation of these artists won't be coming out of the bay, ironically you'll start to see more culture and art come out of places like Detroit.

I think you're conflating avant-garde with world class.

Take restaurants for example - super easy to start a new inventive restaurant in Detroit (low rent, low labor costs, etc.), but it's nearly impossible to make a $500/head prix-fixe work there (and that is, for better of worse, the type of food that causes people to flock now-a-days). Even Portland sees most of it's 'starving artist' chefs decamp to NY / SF / LA once they gain a national brand.

weather alone is not worth the current housing prices in California, specially considering how we're actively fucking up climate.

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