They Can’t Leave the Bay Area Fast Enough | Hacker News Reader

They Can’t Leave the Bay Area Fast Enough

nytimes.com

46 pointscamillovisini26 comments

As a visitor to the Bay Area for the last 30 years, the biggest change I have seen occur is, by far, the proliferation of tent camps and strung-out homeless. I have been to 30 countries including North Korea and most of the Stans-- and the Bay Area, specifically SF/Oakland/Berkeley is the Hall of Fame for sketchy and unsafe. I suppose New York in the 80's was worse...but currently seems like Bay Area. I stayed at a rather swanky Hilton in SF but all night listened to the sounds of homeless people fighting outside-- it was very dystopian.

Our DA is a joke. The cops don't make arrests. Judges don't do squat. The entire justice system is rotten here. You're free to openly steal from Walgreens and commit as much property crime or assault and cops will never do anything. Our joke of a DA recently refused to charge a repeat offender who went on to kill two others. I'm super progressive, but I cannot understand why the left thinks it's progressive to let people defecate in the street and that giving free needles and tents to that crowd is helping them. The left in America is sick sad joke. Compare SF to Amsterdam and it boggles my mind to see what the left in America does with unchecked power and what Amsterdam can do with similar levels of freedom and even lower income. We have no excuses for how filthy our city is. The only rationalization I can make is that somewhere someone is skimming off these funds and making money off all the homelessness.

David Sacks wrote a piece about this: https://davidsacks.medium.com/the-killer-d-a-54d4c4a5135f

>Chesa Boudin was only fourteen months old when both his mother and father, members of a left-wing terrorist group called the Weather Underground, were arrested as accessories to the murder of two police officers and a security guard during the 1981 robbery of a Brinks truck. His mother served over twenty years, while his father is still incarcerated almost forty years later (Boudin was raised by Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn). Boudin has said that his earliest memories are of visiting his parents in prison and these experiences formed his political views. Perhaps because of this personal history (along with a general commitment to doctrinaire leftism that saw him work for and praise Hugo Chavez long after he revealed himself to be a strongman intent on governing for life), Boudin has made decarceration — the reduction of the numbers of people held in jails and prisons — his signature issue.

This whole Batman effect of having their personal lives outwardly influence their professional-lives has dramatic impacts for everyone else.

Anecdotally, my Bay Area friends are all excited about the prospect of decreasing pressure on their cities.

Plenty of people still want to be in the Bay Area. The previous situation was far too oversubscribed for the amount of space and housing available. Release some of that pressure and the city could become more attractive again. They will still need to solve the crime issues, though.

"‘I just had a burrito for $6. It was amazing.’

The last burrito he had in San Francisco cost $15."

I remember burritos going for $2.50 in San Francisco in '96 ($4 got you a monster burrito, I never could have finished one of those).

Now burritos is not where most money goes, but I can't help to wonder if the absurdly increased cost of living in the S.F. Bay Area in the last 25 years isn't an impediment for start-ups. Most of those won't be able to pay 'competitive' salaries, but feed their employees promises and hope instead. FAANG employees can afford to live in S.F., but how do those living on a shoe-string budget and working for a start-up manage?

I think all that will be left in Bay-Area are FAANG type companies, and the 0.1% type people.

The remaining companies that are pre-IPO or pre-exit will be "go big or go home" types.

SF and Bay-Area at that point is basically a status indicator.

This is what I don't get about the (former?) SF / Bay Area startup scene. VCs tell startups "keep your cash burn rate as low as possible, to give yourself a long runway." But then they also want startups to move to SF -- the most expensive city in the country! Don't these 2 things conflict?

Investors for the most part no longer ask / want startups to move to SF. This was a trend even before COVID.

Not to take away from the main point about cost of living, but I have severe doubt about that quote being representative. Burritos at the local truck that I'm partial to are around $9, which seems par for the course around here. I literally don't know where it's even possible to pay $15 for a burrito in SF, even at the fancier brick and mortar restaurants. I'm sure there's one somewhere, but I'm also sure that the size weighted burrito cost in SF isn't anywhere near 2.5x that of SD. I'd be pretty surprised if it was even 1.5x.

Not an expert on the SD burrito scene, but looking at a random survey (https://sandiego.eater.com/2018/8/8/17660256/california-burr... ) suggests that most of them are in the $6-8 range, for a smaller burrito than the SF Mission ones that are my point of comparison. (Amusingly, that article actually does include a $15 burrito.)

Super burrito is $13 at La Taqueria but you get an amazing burrito. After tax that’s about $15.

I bought an Al Pastor super burrito at Little Chihuahua on Polk a few days ago for $15.32 after tax.

Papalote burritos can easily cost $15 inc tax if you order them super. They even have a $20 burrito on the menu, before tax. Although they're all amazing

>Now burritos is not where most money goes

Speak for yourself!

For all the people leaving SF/Bay-Area and particularly California, I wanted to ask these two questions.

1. California has the strongest non-compete laws in the nation, was this something that influenced your decision?

2. California has IP laws which are to the effect that "what you create in your own time with your own resources cannot be used by your employer" (disclaimer IANAL). This has a grey area for large FAANG type employers that can enter any domain, but Bay-Area has lots of companies doing amazing things. So it opens up opportunities to start new companies in new frontiers.

The above two are still major factors that are preventing me from leaving California at least despite the high taxes, rents etc...

Bay-Area is still the best place w.r.t to getting investment and finding interesting tech-companies.

I'm curious what thoughts others have here.

I left the bay area in 2020. Neither of those 2 really were on my mind. I haven't heard any horror stories about tech companies trying to enforce any kind of non-compete outside of CA so it never really popped in my mind.

Biggest issues were 1) no state income tax, 2) money goes a lot further, 3) gov't policies unfriendly to businesses and middle class, 4) more moderate political climate, 5) better social life.

What I miss the most is the more temperate weather and being able to grow food in my backyard.

You can grow food in your backyard in most places in the US especially the south.

> California has the strongest non-compete laws in the nation, was this something that influenced your decision?

You can always move back to California and work for a California employer, at which point the courts will likely nullify any non-compete as contrary to California law and public policy.

I hope that places like Austin are forward-looking enough to absorb the new people without running into the same issues as SF. To be fair, it's pretty hard to actually do worse than SF, but there are still issues to watch out for. The biggest thing is housing. When tons of people suddenly show up who consider a million dollar house affordable, it can really do a number on people who don't earn tech salaries. It looks like Austin is still working on getting away from the exclusionary zoning paradigm, I hope they're successful.

if you take the human factor out of play it is painfully absurd that businesses and itinerant professionals continually choose to locate their business hubs within midsize boutique cities that are poorly situated for if not outright hostile to expansion. seems like it'd be a lot easier to make phoenix 'hipper' than it will be to make boulder or austin 'bigger'. resentment is intellectually lazy and i know hn frowns upon NIMBY-ism but it is hard not to feel like the west coast locusts are bearing down upon us to cannibalize everything that made home 'home' before moving on in another 10 to 20 years once our communities have been stripped to the marrow.

Austin has had a growing homeless problem, but nothing like SF or NYC. Still, lots of drug use, petty theft, and loitering in the inner city and university areas.

However, it is Texas, and there is lots of room to spread out. If you never find yourself in the city center then you will not see it.

Austin's already out of play for being "cool". The downtown area is stupidly expensive now (it was higher than the Bay Area before Covid--I suspect that is worse now).

One of the problems going on everywhere in the US right now is that places won't drop rent. Apparently, you can tack missing rent onto the end of your financing, but if you offer lower rent the bank holding your financing can call you up and demand cash.

This is going to totally screw up recovery as everybody will leave places empty until they're about to go bankrupt. And then everybody will go bankrupt simultaneously rather than piecemeal.

Relevant article I read the other day: https://www.wsj.com/articles/start-up-city-accelerated-growt... . My impression from it is that Austin will be embracing growth better than the Bay Area. They seem more keen on increasing supply to meet demand.

Houston doesn’t have zoning. And both Houston and Austin both don’t try to restrict housing development like California seems to do. Permits are relatively fast to get, land is plentiful and you don’t have nonsense like how San Jose turned 1400 acres of empty farmland at Coyote Valley into an open-space preserve. (Not opposed to open space, but that 1400 acres was literally just empty fields when supposedly the Bay Area has a “housing crisis.”)

Great article. I am so happy that Nellie Bowles added me in the article.

"So he and his family moved to Austin. For the same price as their three-bedroom apartment in Cupertino, they have a five-bedroom home on an acre of land. For the first time, Mr. Boydas has outdoor space. "

Bay Area is large, it should be fine. Fires sucked but hopefully this can be mitigated in the future. I'm not sure about SF though, it might become a cyberpunk dystopia with high tech downtown surrounded by filth, hopefully not.

I still love SF but after moving to NYC the quality of life here is just way better. Much cleaner and safer.

Pace of life is a bit slower but that is kind of nice too if you’re older and have a family.

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