Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus | Hacker News Reader

Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus

sfciti.org

228 pointskyleblarson322 comments

It's somewhat interesting that some numbers are based on the bay area (drop in bay area tech workers inflow/outflow, what percentage of bay area workforce will remain remote), while other numbers based on San Francisco alone (drop in SF residents, SF GDP, business tax revenue, etc.).

I know that outside of California, the world views "SF" and "the bay area" mostly as one and the same. Based on anecdotes I feel like this doesn't tell the full story, though maybe it does give you a high level overview (like this site does).

Among both personal friends and coworkers, ex-coworkers (from a decade+ of working in the bay area) -- surely there are people who move out of state (to Denver, Austin, Miami, etc.); but the more common trend is -- people who used to live in SF are moving out to the east bay / surrounding areas; and people who were already in the east bay before move even further away (Sacramento area, etc.). Another interesting bit -- Sacramento doesn't get talked about in tech circles and sites like this and related articles, because it's not supposed to be the "next sexy tech town", but in reality is a lot of people have moved here since the pandemic, both tech and not. I moved here before the pandemic, and witnessed the housing market rise more than the east bay (where there's already an influx of SF people moving to) this past year.

All I'm saying is there's a lot of nuances in this general exodus!

Keep in mind SF.citi is a policy advocate/lobbying group for San Francisco legislation rather than the Bay Area more generally.

But they blend in wider Bay Area population stats because this is really about jobs that generate SF payroll tax which gives these employers a tacit say and leverage. Remember if you live in Oakland or Redwood City but are employed in San Francisco city/county, some of your payroll tax is being generated to benefit the city of San Francisco even if you are not a resident there.

That's why SF City is worried about SF based businesses and SF Bay Area workers.

(BTW this is also why cities such as Mountain View and Cupertino want to attract large business campuses like Google and Apple but don't want to build homes - they get more income from growing payroll tax but don't then have to spend more on schools, services etc for a growing population - they shift the burden onto other cities and counties that house those workers as they then have to generate tax revenue from other means)

> But they blend in wider Bay Area population stats because this is really about jobs that generate SF payroll tax which gives these employers a tacit say and leverage.

SF doesn’t have local payroll tax, it has a local income tax that applies both to residents and to nonresidents on income earned in SF.

EDIT: Actually, this is wrong, too; despite a lot of sources indicating it. Sab Francisco had a 1.5% payroll expense tax, but voted to phase it out in 2012, and then (while it had declined to a much lower but nonzero number), voted to eliminated it last year, both times in favor of a gross receipts tax on business

> SF doesn’t have local payroll tax, it has a local income tax that applies both to residents and to nonresidents on income earned in SF.

This is false. There are some low-quality websites that have incorrect information about a nonexistent 1.50% SF income tax, if that's where you're getting your information.

San Francisco used to have a payroll tax up until last year, when Prop F replaced it with a gross receipts tax. [1]

[1] https://sftreasurer.org/prop-f-overhaul

Do you happen to know the reason for favoring a gross receipts tax over the previous payroll tax? Just curious as someone who previously lived in an area with a Griggs receipt tax, it seems it was universally despised.

Hilariously, it was done because the tech companies, particularly Twitter, which had small gross receipts and high payroll, pushed for it.[0]

Later, Square, founded by the same person as Twitter got pretty badly screwed by this very same tax [1], and it got worse when Prop C passed.

[0]: https://www.spur.org/news/2012-09-28/time-now-business-tax-r...

[1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Square-is-suing...

“pretty badly screwed” = growing to a $90B company.

> Sacramento doesn't get talked about in tech circles and sites like this and related articles, because it's not supposed to be the "next sexy tech town", but in reality is a lot of people have moved here since the pandemic, both tech and not.

Sacramento also has a train line that takes you to Santa Clara, which is better than driving - this has made it a better choice for a few of the folks to consider that over Dublin or Pleasanton in the most recent migration (Amtrak is close to a lot of hardware-lab specific jobs like Nvidia, Lockheed, Marvell, GlobalFoundries and Arista), though that connectivity might shift if BART finally loops around to SJC.

Also Sacramento has good schools, decent federal funding pull (over say Tracy) and an airport with a few direct flights from Seattle or NYC.

The only downside pretty much is the weather in comparison and that too not by much.

> The only downside pretty much is the weather in comparison and that too not by much.

Sports, bars, culture, muni metro, proximity to the ocean, proximity to nature (I can be alone in natural parks with less than 30 minutes of driving from my house in SF), jobs, dating, restaurants, I could go on.

I'm not even someone that plans on staying in SF (I actually don't like it that much), but there are lots of downsides if I left for Sacramento. I realize there are upsides as well, but I think it's disingenuous to say 'Sacramento is as good or better than San Francisco except for the weather'

I can't comment on other items on that list, but the amount of nature you can be in within 30 minutes of driving from anywhere in the Sacramento region is drastically more than 30 minutes from anywhere in the bay area. Our family has been able to enjoy the nature a lot more since moving out here.

Certain aspects change in priority drastically as one's life stage changes. Dating is one of those. As one goes from being single to married, dating goes from being just about the highest priority concern to the lowest. Similar for bars/night life. Once those things are out of the picture, I find Sacramento to be infinitely more enjoyable than SF.

Totally agreed but gotta say Ive never lived in a city where my wife and I have enjoyed our dates more.

There seems to be literally no end to the number of world-class coffee shops, breweries, brick oven pizza joints, sushi restaurants and parks out here.

After growing up in SF, living in the desert for a long time and desperately trying to make NY and LA work I can honestly say Sacramento is the healthiest feeling place Ive ever lived. And thats including the weather. Its a dry heat... :)

That said we moved here during COVID so still trying to figure out how to connect with tech folks out here of anyone has any thoughts?

"but the amount of nature you can be in within 30 minutes of driving from anywhere in the Sacramento region is drastically more than 30 minutes from anywhere in the bay area."

Not true at all. The sad truth is there are more hiking trails and options for "stuff" involving nature than a far majority of folks realize. Even in areas like Los Altos, Palo Alto, Cupertino, etc, are dangerously close to non-urban reserves and other spaces, but often have no idea.

Many feel fine driving from Palo Alto to go to Marin for Alamere Falls and brunch in Mill Valley, but have no idea Butano or Purisima or Skeggs and brunch in Woodside or Pescadero or Davenport and is a fraction of the distance and comparatively stunning.

Well, as someone who lives in the SF Bay Area but genuinely loves Sacramento, I think it's actually pretty easy to undersell it. Sacramento has some wonderfully walkable, vibrant neighborhoods, particularly around Midtown and downtown. Before the pandemic, it wasn't uncommon for me to have an evening there that went something like this: early drinks at the Jungle Bird, a terrific retro tiki bar; a walk a few blocks to any number of solid restaurants (ones I remember were Cantina Alley, Frank Fat's, Lucca, Camden Spit & Larder, The Press, Broderick, and Centro Cocina Mexicana), maybe off to Temple Coffee afterward, and if we didn't get dessert at the restaurant, a stop at Rick's Dessert Diner or Ginger Elizabeth Chocolates. I've worked in both downtown San Francisco and downtown San Jose, and honestly prefer downtown Sacramento to both (although see the qualifier below).

As for nature, well: obviously Sacramento ain't near the ocean. But it has two rivers running through it, a lot of parks (Sacramento has more trees per capita than any other major city in the United States -- seriously!), and you don't have to drive very far to get into the Sierra foothills. You'd be surprised at what you can find around there.

The qualifier below: obviously San Francisco is, for all of its warts, a "world class" city in ways that few other cities in the United States are. I like Midtown Sacramento more than any neighborhood I spent time in around SF, with the possible exception of Hayes Valley, but many neighborhoods in have great attractions and you can get to all of them via public transit. But unless "a half-dozen world class bars and four three Michelin-starred restaurants" is a make-or-break requirement, Sacramento is...honestly pretty nice. I really wish I'd been able to get things together to move there in 2019, because real estate prices started shooting up during the pandemic.

I thought the claim about trees was a bit tenuous so I tried to find a citation. It may be the source for this claim is Treepedia

http://senseable.mit.edu/treepedia/

I had never heard of this site before. It is a fantastic presentation from MIT of an open source project for measuring Urban green space.

Good searching! I've heard the claim about Sacramento before and think I found it somewhere fairly reliable, but it's admittedly been a few years. It would have been safer to say "Sacramento has a lot more trees than you might think it does." :)

Sacto is underrated (although I think I'd rather be in sleepier Davis and just train up) and downtown SJ has been overly maligned, often without any direct experience (or any real attempt to look).

I live in the latter now, literally in SoFA (South First Arts district) and certainly before COVID it was a small but damn vibrant area.

I definitely know the place! Haberdasher might be the best whiskey bar in the Bay Area.

Davis seems like a neat place, although real estate was surprisingly expensive the last time I checked. (Okay, sure, welcome to California.)

Proximity to nature? Sacramento is near the Tahoe area as well as the rest of the Sierra Nevada range. Proximity to nature is one area where Sacramento resoundingly beats the Bay area. However I agree with the rest of your examples.

Dating? I hear that dating is an absolute disaster in San Francisco.

Endless homeless people and camps, needles on the streets, feces on the streets, yelling drunks, crime and burglaries.

Yeah, SF definitely has a “lot” going for it. Glad I left.

The backlash against homeless people is coming.[1] There's a GoFundMe for a scheme for national homeless concentration camps.[2]

"The plan calls for the construction of 6 Homeless Help Campuses. These would be built on Federal Land by the Army Corps of Engineers and would be funded by the Federal Government through grants to the hosting states. Targeted states are California, Washington, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey and Georgia. Each campus will hold up to 50,000 residents. The campuses will include all services required by the residents including K-12 education, a trade tech college, physical and mental health care programs and will even include a local community based policing agency."

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/California-s-reope...

[2] https://homelesshelpamerica.com/

You have a substantive point and this is an interesting comment but please don't toss in flamebait like "concentration camps" - it will just create a flamewar and with Godwin-colored flames at that. Thoughtful critique is fine of course.

That’s what a concentration camp is though. It’s not hyperbole it’s literally the idea of them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment

Incredible timing on their part! They just need to build it as part of SF proper and not Corps of Engineers land and get it done for 2024 and they’ll be right on the mark: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sanctuary_District

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Past_Tense,_Part_I_(epi...

I would disagree with your framing here on two points:

(1) The "backlash" is not "coming," it's always been here. NIMBYs are not a new phenomenon and there will always be cranky people who respond to the plight of the homeless with "won't someone think of the property values." So it goes.

(1) More significantly: that is not remotely a serious organization. It's a few NIMBYs from LA who got sticks up their asses about a city council member proposing a homeless encampment near where they live. Come on, take a look around that web site: the "board of directors" have no bios or information, the "case studies" are nothing of the sort, there's no indication they've done any of the filings necessary to be a real non-profit. The site is, as near as I can tell, built using GoDaddy's free site builder (which is why it has the "Powered by GoDaddy" link in the footer: they're too cheap to pay a few bucks to turn it off), and it still has placeholder text like "Add a footnote if this applies to your business."

I mean, sure, even obvious cranks can get people to take them seriously -- but this is at best a group to keep an eye on. "The plan" you quoted is their pipe dream, not an actual plan any government agency has committed funds for.

Using "NIMBY" to mean "people who don't want to be near homeless camps" is a bit of a stretch.

Where did you go since that's the topic of conversation?

disingenuous? it’s just his opinion. having lived both places, i agree. just my opinion

Many people also find the hedonistic, materialist, and vapid culture of SF repulsive. I can understand why many people would want to be arms length to it, using it for the occasional good restaurant or art exhibit and then heading home to a place more fulfilling and community oriented. To not be immersed in it and all of its adjacent dysfunction.

SF is a whore you visit here and there but not often and certainly not one you make a meaningful part of your life - so-to-speak. Get the money and get out when you grow up some and want to take life more seriously than 40 year-olds hopelessly clinging to youth on the muni kickball field.

> Also Sacramento has good schools

There are a number of factors that make the school system so outstanding:

1: The best schools are the public schools. There are some perfectly fine private schools, but the public schools (at least in SJUSD) are even better.

2: There are excellent magnet programs at the elementary, middle, and high school level. These programs do not exist in some other areas, including in Silicon Valley (this has come as an unwelcome surprise to my family). The schools in Sacramento regularly send their kids to national rounds of science competitions, and when I was a student (20 years ago) they regularly placed in the top 5 nationally.

3: Students from throughout the region can 'open-enroll' into magnet programs, regardless of geography. In my high school, we had students who came from 45 minutes away.

So the upshot is there are great schools that are free and that are available to any student (especially the advanced programs).

Sacramento to Santa Clara is a 3 hour trip one way. No one is doing that daily.

This for sure. East bay, north bay all getting SF exodus. Then my friends in richmond moved even further away but still extended bay area. The place with the most at risk is SF. Still huge concentration of wealth, but the non- employment factors have been hurt.

Gone very light on crime - super light. At some point folks just get tired of dealing / seeing consequence free crime right in front of them. I think families with kids being impacted there particularly.

I think families with kids being impacted there particularly.

Yes, one example that is not widely known of what happens when the Lions of the Left have the power to do what they really want is public middle school algebra in SF. ("The Lion of the Left" was the self-given nickname of one of SF's most-loved talk show hosts back in the 90s.)

SF grandees noticed that some races tended to take geometry (the class after algebra I) more than others. The number one goal of public education, they claimed, was to "close the achievement gap", so they eliminated geometry from middle school. If no one took it, no one who didn't take it would be behind, so no gap.

But then they noticed that some races still took algebra I more often than other races. So they eliminated that, too. [1] No one, no matter how well prepared, would be allowed to take algebra in any public middle school. The best students would be required to take the same classes as the worst, for great justice. Achievement gap closed.

Except that better students still had four years in high school to try to catch up to where they would have been if not held back, and not all races were equally likely to do this.

So, for more justice, all public schools in SF were required to keep their best math students in the same classes with the worst all the way from K-10. They are now only allowed to be different individuals the final two years of HS. Anyone who wants to take calculus in a SF high school now has to scramble to cram two years (algebra II/trig & pre-calc) into 11th grade to (poorly) prepare for calculus in 12th--until that miscarriage of justice can be eliminated, too.

Those who can afford it go to work at tech companies where they use various means to silence the "haters" who resist, while sending their own children to private schools that don't have these policies.

Many of those who can't afford it have been moving out of the city to suburbs that have begun the process (lots of districts have now eliminated middle school geometry and advanced placement classes) but are still lagging behind SF in implementing full justice. (Big Tech is working on it, but pockets of resistance remain.)

SF Chronicle, a big proponent of policies like this, describes it as positively as they can: [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/SF-schools-mov...

Activists have long history of destroying good schools, all that matters is ideology and feel good activism, consequences be damned. See Dunbar High School history mentioned by Sowell: before and after dismantling segregation. SF Chronicle is pure propaganda.

I think there will be some state standards that will get rid of calculus in high school. I'm not actually against that, I never thought it was such as big deal.

Other parts of the standards (focus on group work, and on racial justice work in math) which may be designed in part to help reduce achievement gap do raise some questions around preparedness of some students that would result. This will only work if they get rid of standardized testing I think in later years (college admissions etc).

Group work doesn't exist in the school. It's always 1 person doing everything and others freeloading on their work.

Anecdotally, my sister moved to SF from the east coast a couple of years ago. After her patio was burgled a few times, she didn't feel safe so she and her husband moved to Santa Rosa, about 90 minutes north. She's happy as a clam there.

What crime? I’ve got complaints about living in SF, but it’s basically crime-free from my experiences.

My car was broken into multiple times, stolen a few times (I used tickets to find it because the cops wouldn't take even the basic step of matching parking tickets with stolen car reports).

I worked in the tenderloin - so plenty of open air drug dealing (not a huge problem) as well as random attacks on people (a problem). My roommate was jumped and beaten near our place - very disruptive to his life in general.

I actually caught folks who had stolen my car, good response by police, got them in the car too driving it. I asked, if I pressed charges, what's the consequence. A few days in jail if I was lucky and wanted to spend years pursuing the case - these would be guys who I'd then have a beef with in my neighborhood.

I didn't carry a gun or knife and just didn't want to beef with the dudes hanging out. At some point you are like, is this worth it? As you get older, have kids - you just want to let you kid play. Where I am now the kids can play on their own with neighbors on the street - no worries. Much nicer in my view.

And here I am living in one of the places that most of the SF tech crowd would consider synonymous with "failed rust belt shithole" where none of that stuff happens at any appreciable scale.

Not the OP, but while I was living in SF I saw drugs sold on the street, needles left on the ground in public parks, people stealing registration stickers off license plates, smashed car windows, people blocking sidewalks and harassing pedestrians, ridiculously unsafe driving (e.g. running reds including cops, ppl cutting across three lanes to make a left from the right lane, etc), guests who visited me were flashed by randos, a dude was jerking into a newspaper box by the BART, neighbors would smoke inside nonsmoking apartments with shared ventilation, etc.

I'd move back again for work if I have to, but it would take a lot of $$$$ to convince me.

Got off BART at Civic Center station at about 11:00 AM last Saturday. Walked past two guy sprawled in a hallway in the station smoking heroin or something from a piece of tin foil, and past another one doing the same as I climbed the stairs to the street. At the top of the stairs were a handful of guys gathered around a stereo smoking weed and, based on what I was seeing, selling it too. A few minutes later, just as I passed the tent city near City Hall, I ran into another guy torching something on a sheet of tin foil.

More shit than I've ever seen on any city streets. Every doorway, tree, and wall reeks of piss. It's no way to live.

All of what you mentioned is a reason why I only ride 1 station by BART and rest by Caltrain.

"but while I was living in SF I saw drugs sold on the street, needles left on the ground in public parks, people stealing registration stickers off license plates, smashed car windows, people blocking sidewalks and harassing pedestrians, ridiculously unsafe driving" ...things I've also seen in Chicago, NYC, Miami, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Portland (among others).

Not saying that's ok, just that SF is hardly unique in that regard.

Sounds like parts of just about every big city.

I have never experienced anything like this living on the east coast (NYC/Boston)

Many of these are absent in New York, including very visible homeless encampments, so no, these are not in “just about every big city”; many of these are specific to West Coast cities due to a failure in public policy.

I think it's really easy how normalized a person can get to petty crime. Like a frog in boiling water. You'll talk to people in SF who totally brush off smash-and-grabs. They'll say something like "stupid me, shouldn't have left my AirPods visible in the center console." You don't even realize that it's not normal to have to worry about stuff like that.

It's especially hilarious how this type of people gets offended when people are victim blaming victims of different kinds of crimes and when it comes to property crime around SF it's "oh, you idiot, never leave anything in the car".

It is normal to worry about smash and grabs in every US urban area I've ever lived in or visited.

San Francisco has the worst property crime rate of any major city in America.[1] It's more than three times worse than what you'd find in New York, Boston or San Diego. It's even about twice as bad as Austin, Chicago or Philadelphia, which aren't exactly known as low crime cities. Moreover the discrepancy is likely understated since so much property crime goes unreported in SF.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Between all my bike thefts, car thefts, window break ins etc- I reported only car theft. Crime is widely understated in SF. People will step over a dying person in SF.

1. Two people with knives tried to mug my father. Chinatown. 2. Two people tried to mug me. Nob Hill. 3. Car was broken into. Model airplane was taken. Just off Van Ness. 4. Mother had her purse slashed. Chinatown. 5. Brother in law had his bike stolen. He locked it in front of the Exploratorium. 6. One brother had his car stolen (but this was Oakland). 7. Roommate got hit on the head, knocked out, had stuff taken. This was late at night a few blocks from the Haight.

> Gone very light on crime - super light. At some point folks just get tired of dealing / seeing consequence free crime right in front of them. I think families with kids being impacted there particularly.

I challenge that statement. Do you have any data support it? It is a myth repeated over and over by certain people and it’s never supported by data.

Violent crime in SF is near all time lows. That’s just the facts.[1]

My neighborhood I’ve lived in for 15 years has gotten so much safer and we are raising kids and loving it.

The crazy thing is the conservative tech activists who moved to Miami.. moved to a city with higher crime! Miami is higher crime than SF. So is Dallas (that was another profile in the local paper).

It’s insane that no one is challenging them on the facts. I think this is all because a bunch of progressive supervisors got elected who are critical of certain elements of the tech industry, and the tech guys don’t have a good response and so they are doing the usual conservative tough-on-crime political ploy to try to get rid of them.

[1] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/san-fran...

Sure - "'Out of control': Organized crime drives S.F. shoplifting, closing 17 Walgreens in five years"

https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/Out-of-co...

If you haven't been seeing this you haven't been watching. It's absolutely brazen - daylight robbery literally - and turns the store workers and folks shopping into cynics.

Chelsea (new DA) took office end of 2019 or early 2020. That really marked a major change.

"A violent year: Bay Area killings spiked 35% in 2020"

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/A-violent-year-Bay...

You probably don't realize how much crime is simply unreported - it's a massive amount. Go to any car glass shop - they will tell you how "crime free" SF is.

Note that I grew up in an actual low crime city. That means I never had a house key, we never locked the house. We left the keys in our cars. This isn't out in the middle of no where, this was a city (with very low crime).

You say your children can walk to neighbors freely like children can in east bay? You are the exception in SF.

I realized that folks in the city are just so used to crime, to the steps you have to take to avoid it, they don't realize the impact it has on their quality of life. You really don't get to know your neighbors that well (relative to a totally safe neighborhood where everyone is more welcoming). This last bit is anecdotal, but neighbors really look out for each other outside SF. Folks do the block email lists, get togethers.

I did a quick comparison to Lafayette in east bay.

San Francisco 2019 Murders (which was a low) - 4.5 murders per 100K. Lafayette - 0.0 per 100K. Robberies SF - 344 per 100K. Lafayette 11 per 100K. Lafayette had 3 robberies in the entire year. The differences are likely larger as in SF there are so many robberies per day that a fair number just don't get reported, especially in some parts of town where cops are not liked - folks are not calling it all in.

You’re comparing SF, a major city, to Lafayette, a suburb. That is objectively a ridiculous comparison. You will see similar disparities in most comparisons of that nature.

Your only SF specific crime stat is about property crime (shoplifting). Consistent with what I wrote.

Your second stat on murders is regional, not specific to SF, which overall remains near all time lows in violent crime. You then blame the regional Bay Area rise on SF’s district attorney which makes no sense.

This is all consistent with what I’m saying: the “safety” claims are not supported by data. Some folks in the tech community just keep saying it over and over within a specific sphere but I’m calling B.S. SF is safer than it’s been for most of our lives.

> You’re comparing SF, a major city, to Lafayette, a suburb. That is objectively a ridiculous comparison. You will see similar disparities in most comparisons of that nature.

Why? OP's numbers are per capita.

My family and I moved from SF to Lafayette precisely for these reasons: we were subject to assaults and intimidation from strangers in the street in SF (police refused to follow up), our car and garage were broken into once a year on average (police did not report back for any of the 7 police reports we filed), the total losses exceeded $5000. Others have it worse; our doctor had her house burned down by a mentally ill arsonist.

In addition, we were not looking forward to raising our kids in the SF public school system and we don't have enough money to pay for private school, so we moved out. In Lafayette, I can let my kids walk to school without worrying about them getting mugged. (By the way, aside from the neighborhood, you may experience public safety very differently depending on your height, weight, sex, and race. The stats won't tell you any of that, nor the amount of under-reporting going on due to the loss of public trust in the police/DA to do their job.)

We know many other families who followed similar trajectories.

Because the claim is that SF violent crime got worse, which is false. You are resorting to comparing the general disparity in crime rates between major cities and small towns, which is not unique to SF. Therefore it is an illogical argument.

I have no disagreement with you in your general point or personal preference for small exclusive bedroom communities where poor people cannot afford to live, but the same could be said in comparison for Miami, Austin, Dallas or any other major city.

And yet compared to New York, Chicago, or any other major city the stats are in the dumpster. [1] Or even San Jose. It is clear that even within the Bay Area SF is disproportionately bad and you have to wonder whose responsibility that is. City leadership - the DA and mayor included - have to have some responsibility?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... (sort by property crime)

> And yet compared to New York, Chicago…

Chicago has massively higher violent crime rate than SF. By your own citation.

> It is clear that even within the Bay Area SF is disproportionately bad

You claim with no data.

This is what I mean — the facts just don’t support the “SF has gotten less safe” argument.

Anecdotal but this isn't my personal experience at all. Almost everyone I know is moving home to be closer to family like the midwest, east coast, etc or to awesome lifestyle towns like Park City, Truckee, Jason Hole, Boise, SLC, Boulder, etc, etc. Of 20 people I can name off the top of my head who've left SF area, only a couple migrated from SF to Oakland, etc.

I would like to counteranecdote and say that the nice east bay neighborhood I live in is getting flooded by families leaving San Francisco right now.

I'm in same boat. One problem - SF folks are RICH (relatively). It's nuts what tech pays, what stock options have done for folks if they are 10-12 years in at facebook / google etc. Ugh.

> Anecdotal but this isn't my personal experience at all

Yes, but there have been plenty of nonanecdotal studies, and the surge in Bay Area (and broader urban coastal California) outmigration around the pandemic has been overwhelmingly to inland California, particularly (in the Bay Area case) the Sacramento region. (California had a preexisting net domestic outmigration, too, but that’s separate from the more recent “San Francisco tech exodus”, which is specifically part of the pandemic urban outmigration.)

Unfortunately for my finances (being a Sacramento-area homeowner that isn’t going to sell right now), that’ll reverse when the reasons people valued the coastal urban centers are restored with full economic reopening.

While I wait for my employer to finally decide the "full remote" question, we have been low-key looking for homes out there, from Sac to Folsom all the way to Placerville. I think we missed the boat and should have gambled on remote by pulling the trigger earlier. Prices have just shot up since the beginning of the pandemic, and our Bay Area house hasn't risen in value comparatively. Also, inventory is way down. He who hesitates...

This matches my experience as well. Sacramento is underrated IMO. It’s a nice city, and being under 3 hours to both SF and Lake Tahoe is great.

I'm relocating to Bay Area right now, would love to live in SF, but the schools are grossly mismanaged so I'm going to MV instead. I doubt I'm the only person.

"Based on anecdotes I feel like this doesn't tell the full story"

Not even remotely. Within a compact area, the three major poles (SF, Oakland/Berkeley nd San Jose) have different histories, and narrative threads that lead to different spaces between. Even by age, you'll see widely divergent attitudes about what constitutes "home" (SF is the most insular and aloof in general, and not always in a derogatory way), San Jose the most maligned (sometimes legitimately, sometimes very much not) and Oakland (until recently) treated as a crucial but often 'a part, yet apart' microcosm unto itself, with Berkeley its neighboring city-state. People in different stages of life have often moved around and between the three, for varying reasons.

Many who are from here and certainly many who have moved TO here, move "around" the area more than truly exodus out.

So many of our "professional" friends have converged on Sacramento. Lawyers, doctors, accountants, and also tech people. We have a very strong pull towards the area, as a result. Previously, all of these different people and couples were spread all over California and/or the country. They've all moved there in the last 1-5 years and are establishing roots through families, etc... My wife and I intend to join them in the next 1-3 years, relocating from Orange county.

I know three people who separately just moved to sac from the east bay. And a couple who are thinking about it... didn’t realize this was a trend.

As someone who grew up in Sac, don’t do it guys! It might be a quick drive but it’s a different California.

The first sentence of your comment gives away that you grew up in Sacramento.

It was only when I left the area as an adult that people told me they thought it was weird that people referred to it as "Sac" (and "East Sac", "West Sac", etc.). Apparently for the uninitiated, this reminds people (at least young men) of a body part.

i enjoy it much better than bay area. to each his own

> but the more common trend is -- people who used to live in SF are moving out to the east bay / surrounding areas

Emily Badger had an article in the NYT recently showing exactly this. People are moving from the core to the "suburbs".

In my opinion, SF has peaked. I personally moved to SF during the pandemic, and am planning to move out when my lease is up. The amount of disarray in the city is wild. Crime seems to be entirely ignored, the homeless problem has exploded and there is a widespread hate if you call it for what it is: a public health and humanitarian crisis. And the most important thing that SF had to make it a tech hub has been broken and moved online: the network effect.

I moved here because I felt like I didn't have a choice if I wanted to build or be part of successful startups, now I feel like living here is hindering that process. You can live anywhere and get cheaper talent across the country, pay less taxes, and have almost the same upsides.

You have to live someplace with a moonlighting law to have the same upsides. Otherwise, prepare to sign a work contract where the employer owns every thought in your head, and every piece of code that you write on you own time (like when trying to make a startup on the side).

Or just don't work for a company that has such requirements in their contracts. Just because something is allowed doesn't mean most/many/all companies do.

any advice on how to filter that? Seems like I don't find out that information until I've completed a ~8 hour interview process and need to review the final employment offer.

I've also never worked at a company that didn't have that clause.

Bring it up during the initial contact from the recruiter. When they ask about you’re “salary requirements” is when it can be brought up. Ignore the parts on working for competitors (that’s illegal in CA anyways just let the dog be), focus on you’re property only.

When listing projects and ideas last time I got the waiver even while keeping the ideas extremely vague and broadly encompassing. Having said that it isn’t required to even disclose persay.

There aren’t a lot of cases of employers going after an employee unless you directly rip them off or rip off even a part of their valid IP you create. Though if you plan to take VC money at any point they’ll want to see that waiver even if it’s unrelated. If it’s open source there is substantially more leeway.

I’ll let the commenters argue the pedantry. As for OP that’s a very conservative bootlicky answer, every employer has standard boilerplate language against it, you cant filter it out but you can negotiate it away. It’s not an issue usually it’s just some lawyer covering his bases.

Edit: and as a side note California is special in the sense that our economy and brain power is massive. The courts know this and are very worker friendly in this regard. If the lawyers and employers had their way with their insanely restrictive contracts it would severely stifle competition and economic growth/health

Or just politely explain the situation and ask to remove these clauses from the contract. In many cases this works.

I am surprised that the crime and the homeless problem were not even mentioned as the key reasons for people leaving SF. I live on Mission street and a Walgreens near me was closed recently due to the amount of open shoplifting that no one would even bother to stop or investigate. I mean, I pay $3K for a small apartment - I expect some basic level of safety basically in the downtown area of a major US city. Whatever is happening with the local government - it doesn’t work.

From what I've heard, larger companies have stopped trying to prevent shoplifting under a certain amount, since they don't want the liability of their staff getting injured in any altercations. The companies are actively telling their employees to not intervene in a physical manner. This has led to the brazen behavior by shoplifters to steal without concealing their actions.

A delayed response, however it should be noted that the comment above is indicative of someone who isn't trying to contribute or improve anything.

SF has peaked? What do you mean, like the price of a crypto coin or a stock?

Your comment suggests that you first moved to SF sometime in the past eighteen months expecting to discover a get rich quick scheme and now consider yourself an expert on the place. It's possible you're merely <30 and lack context. Perhaps all the aforementioned hypotheses are true.

"Longtime" SF/BA residents have observed an influx of treasure seekers arriving with schemes to earn fortunes since the mid 2000s. If you ask a majority of those longtime residents they would likely tell you that certain things "peaked" in 1998.

You could also go back to the 1970s and 80s when Apple was in its infancy, or when HP was founded in 1939. Residents living then might've given you a different "peak." Of course you could go all the way back to the 1800s and I'd wager that a majority of indigenous peoples felt SF peaked prior to the arrival of Europeans. You can find people who still believe that now if you're curious enough.

The point is that making a comment like yours is unproductive because cities/regions are constantly evolving. Again, probably the majority of longtime residents are hoping SF and the BA will "peak" when the people who moved to the region looking for a quick buck move elsewhere.

Sorry to be confrontational, but when you attack a region or city then you better not miss. If you're always focused on looking for negatives in a place, person, or idea then you'll always be able to identify something to criticize.

I'd posit a unpopular viewpoint: that the attachment to the 'Bohemian' culture is more or less an unhelpful, unprogressive fixation with the past, shamelessly fueled by hypocritical NIMBYs in the city with obvious incentives regarding home value. Can anyone explain why the old SF culture is any more relevant than Byzantine culture?

As an Artist and an Engineer who used to live in SF and moved south recently, I'd argue most of the folks I interacted with in this oft-cried-over demographic were more aptly described as aspiring artists, and that their net contributions to the 'culture' were mimetic and surface-level at best. If you take away the weed, bob marley shirts, and hemp shopping bags, what exactly can we say they did?

None of this is to say the 'nerds' were contributing much to the culture themselves, but I don't think there's much of an argument against them other than that they're boring, rich, and talked about Apps. These same people brought in quickly consumed tax revenue which the city has gorged into in its gluttonous waste.

The root of the problem is the mistrust of the 'Other,' the 'Outsider' as new folks (often Nerds) immigrate to the city, which IS a net benefit to the blending of cultures and ideas. The fixation of preserving the crumbling vestige of the past is what prevents the service level workers from ever regaining a foothold, and the scapegoat is the Nerds, when it should be the landlords and Old Guard.

The Beatniks; The Summer of Love. The Grateful Dead; Janis Joplin; and many, many others are all cultural touchstones of several generations of Americans and largely products of San Francisco.

Many of today’s looser sexual mores got their start or took root in San Francisco, particularly around lgbtq issues.

Sure, 90% of everything is crap, including San Francisco culture, but that last ten percent is a very big deal and the only reason it seems less so today is because it is so pervasive. Whereas it wasn’t before SF and environs produced it.

Those are all culture adders I'd agree, my case is that those are many decades old, and the newer generation you're likely to meet are just a sort of cheap shell of what was, and there hasn't been much cultural innovation, for lack of a better word.

Yes, but the hope (I assume) is that an affordable SF will lead to the next generation of those cultural touchstones. 90% will be crap, but the 10% again... changing culture in America.

Will this happen? Who knows, but SF has generations of influence behind it.

Important context for reading this is that sf.citi is Ron Conway's organization through which he acts as a political power broker and secures political favors for the tech industry. It is in his interest to create the impression that the tech industry in SF is experiencing some kind of crisis in order to extract money, tax breaks or other favorable treatment from the Board of Supervisors.

I'm pretty happy for anyone to hammer on this fact over and over again...

> Between 2010 and 2018, San Francisco produced only one new unit of housing for every 8.5 new jobs.

ps -- "securing [sic] political favors for the tech industry"... that's loaded language to refer to industry lobbying.

And sf has received an enormous amount of money for the tech industry; I think it will have a really rough time if / as the industry starts locating elsewhere.

Perhaps worth mentioning that the fact that someone has a hidden agenda doesn't automatically make everything they say incorrect. In this case, the article tells its story through various statistics that seem to not be cherry-picked.

I'm so excited for the possibility of rental prices coming down enough to support the artists and quirky businesses that used to be around.

The city's consolidation into tech forced out a lot of the vibrancy that made San Francisco unique. Those people are still residents. It's just they've been unable to afford the space to enact some of the things they used to.

SF didn't have a lot of tech until very recently, when they were forced out of the valley by the real gentrifying force, homeowners that won't let anyone build more homes in case it causes traffic.

These are also the people making SF expensive. It's not just artists, it's their own children who can't live there, one reason SF has fewer families with children than any other city IIRC.

As for quirky businesses, that's DRs and licensing.

https://sf.eater.com/2021/4/22/22397615/matcha-n-more-ice-cr...

Is there a good article that describes how / why / when the startup scene moved from the South Bay to San Francisco?

I'm not too familiar with the startup scene before 2010. But from what I know, it was mostly established in its current form before the Dot Com boom.

It seems like HP, Cisco, Intel, Apple, Oracle, Sun, Adobe, Intuit, & Yahoo! where part of one movement.

eBay, PayPal, Google, Facebook & Netflix obviously added to that.

But now all the newer companies are coming from SF - SalesForce, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, AirBNB, Yelp, Splunk, Dropbox, Square, Instagram (originally), Slack, StichFix, Postmates, Instacart, GitHub, Robinhood, Coinbase, etc.

The only recent, pretty big startups in the South Bay I can think of are LinkedIn and Quora. YouTube - from San Bruno - is kind of in the middle. The rest are subsidiaries.

I mean, the OG companies like Apple and Google and Facebook are so big that they dwarf the rest of the startups in the Bay by themselves. So in a sense, the Silicon Valley still feels like the Peninsula. But the startup scene definitely seems to have shifted.

> the OG companies like Apple and Google and Facebook

History time. It's kind of amusing to see these companies referred to as OG, when there were many generations of Silicon Valley startups before them. The real OG was probably Hewlett-Packard, founded in Palo Alto in 1939. Another key company was Shockley Semiconductor, founded in Mountain View in 1956. Eight key employees left Shockley in 1957 and formed Fairchild Semiconductor, gaining the name the "Traitorous Eight". Fairchild led to over 126 startups, sometimes called the Fairchildren, including AMD, Altera, LSI Logic, National Semiconductor, and SanDisk.

Two of the Traitorous Eight, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, left Fairchild in 1968, founding Intel in Mountain View. Later key Silicon Valley companies were Oracle (1977), Sun Microsystems (1982), and Cisco (1984). Although Apple started in 1976, it wasn't a dominant company until years later. Google (1998) and Facebook (2004) are relative newcomers.

Information on Fairchild's influence: https://computerhistory.org/blog/fairchild-and-the-fairchild...

Thanks! This is super cool!

Question - when did the VC model really come into play? Were the Fairchildren like AMD VC funded?

A lot of others have mentioned that space plays a role in this a lot. Companies needed fabricators and data centers, which took up space, so it was too expensive to be in the city.

Is this really all there was to it? Back in these times - there was White Flight from the cities, right? Did most people (even college grads) prefer to work in the suburbs then? Was this even a factor at all?

If you're asking why Silicon Valley is in California at all, the answer is that the state bans all non-compete agreements and won't enforce ones made in other states. This is probably why it's not in Cambridge, though it doesn't explain anything more specific than that.

Don't forget the importance of Shockley's mom being in Palo Alto. His stated reason for moving to the west coast was to be closer to her. Given that pretty much all the "silicon" companies in Silicon Valley are descendants of Shockley Semiconductor, that chance occurrence is probably enough to explain it.

I honestly think non-competes are overstated. I've worked in MA most of my life, once signed one, and it was very specific. I now work for a company that even lets me contribute to competing open source projects. Do all non-CA companies let you do that? I'm aware of one or two consulting firms that have very draconian non-compete clauses but not sure it's very common and MA, specifically, defanged them a while ago.

Personally, I think it was more of a conservative East Coast mentality vs. an anything is possible West Coast Mentality.

Stephen Levy's Hackers is probably a good start (but skip the Stallman The Last Hacker part).

Companies generally preferred to be located in the suburbs because it was generally cheaper. But employees (notably including execs) also preferred to live there. Manufacturing facilities had absolutely been in cities in the past. Teradyne was in Boston. Gillette was in Boston. There are big pharma facilities in Kendall Square today. So it was at least in part access to workers that moved companies out of cities.

Silicon Valley happened because of proximity to Stanford University and Moffett Field and the copious amounts of government / military funding and contracts that came through them (DARPA, etc).

This is a very basic fact of the history of SV that many in the VC scene are reluctant to acknowledge.

You would enjoy the documentary 'Something Ventured'. http://www.somethingventuredthemovie.com/

Apple wasn't terribly interesting until maybe the mid-2000s. OK they were interesting in the Apple religion sense but it really took some combination of OS X, the 4G iPod, and eventually the iPhone taking off to put them in their current category. One could argue that Apple wasn't "a force to be reckoned with" until the late 2000s.

They were pretty good before the 90s when they invented the personal computer, there was just a "beleaguered" era.

They were an interesting hobbyist thing early-on. Although there were also the S-100 bus systems, etc. I actually used Apple IIs at work in the early 80s and then an Apple III. But they were somewhat of a sideshow until the mid/late 2000s.

Even though it's not headquartered in Silicon Valley, IBM's Cottle road site belongs in the early history as well. They invented the hard drive in Building 025...

A seemingly significant part of it is because the young talent wants to live in SF and not commute 1+ hours to an office park in the South Bay. I think SF also offered incentives for tech companies to set up shop in the city in the 2009-2012 time range... https://www.wired.com/story/no-more-deals-san-francisco-cons...

It also generally became trendy for that demographic to live in (certain) cities after they graduate. My company set up an office in the Seaport (partially) for that reason because our main location an hour west of Boston was a deal-killer for some people.

That's certainly true. A career in tech became widely popular and trendy for millenials and now zoomers (I believe CS is now the most popular undergraduate major across US colleges?). Basically once people realized you can make more money in tech than on Wall St, a percentage of new grads who would have moved to NYC diverted for SF.

>I believe CS is now the most popular undergraduate major across US colleges

I saw that in one Google search and it seems incredibly unlikely. This seems much more probable (even if you assign some of the engineering degrees to CS):

https://www.niche.com/blog/the-most-popular-college-majors/

It was largely driven by Millenials, who wanted to work in cities whether they're founding or working for a startup. YCombinator (itself based in Mountain View) found that most of their startups preferred to locate in SF, oftentimes many of them in one building. At one point there was the "YScraper", the Crystal Tower building in North Beach that was home to Justin.TV (parent of Twitch/SocialCam/Cruise), Xobni, Weebly, and Scribd.

Also your list of South Bay startups is pretty incomplete - there's also WhatsApp (Mountain View), Box (Redwood City), Coursera (Mountain View), Khan Academy (Mountain View), Tesla (Palo Alto, with manufacturing in Fremont), the Signal Foundation (Mountain View), RobinHood (headquarters is Menlo Park, not SF), Zoom (San Jose), GoFundMe (Redwood City), Carbon3D (Redwood City), WealthFront (Palo Alto), Impossible Foods (Redwood City), Roblox (San Mateo), and GoPro (San Mateo). I do agree that the center of gravity of the valley moved northwards in the 2010s though. Prior to then, it was debatable whether SF was even really part of the valley, while since then it's been a major tech hotspot.

Short answer: early Silicon Valley needed space for fabricators, the dotcom era needed space for data centers, then around 2010ish there were enough cloud providers and internet connections you could start a company anywhere but you already had plenty of talent in the bay and San Francisco is fun.

Long answer could be a phd thesis but “people needed lots of space until they didnt” kind of suffices.

I've seen several commentators blame AWS! Before AWS, startups needed to budget for web servers and similar hardware, and a place to put them. That meant bigger offices with more floor space, plus power and similar services. Once AWS came (2007) startups could be anywhere, with the city tending to be more attractive to younger folk.

Very few people were putting them directly in their offices, and they certainly weren't buying bigger spaces to fit them. Datacenters are the natural home for this stuff and the price was never exorborant if you're not insisting on a tier 1 facility.

Imagine it is 2003 and you are doing a startup. You aren't deploying anything yet. You need a source code control server, a bug tracker, build servers, testing systems (so many versions of Windows), developer workstations, a file server, and various other bits of infrastructure (plus backups). This easily results in multiple systems per developer. Internet connectivity was slow and expensive which is why this kind of stuff was in the office, not at a colo. So your office needed proportionally more space per person.

Not a good theory. Before AWS startups would colocate. On premise was rare.

You did still want on premise at the beginning, while going through the earlier phases of startup development. For example you need source code control, build servers, bug tracking, test setups, file servers, as well as developer workstations.

Not a significant space issue at the beginning. Still not a good theory.

Quite simply crime rates in SF came down around 2010. It was high in the 90s but even then the first dot com boom had some startups in SF and some in SV. Notably Salesforce. But by the second Web 2.0 boom (as it was called) SF was a very attractive place for young workers.

The earliest SV companies wanted to be physically located near Stanford and Moffett for the govt subsidies/contracts. Still happens (read The Entrepreneurial State) but physical location is not as important in the internet age.

Frankly I would not give this Sf.citi lobbyist piece much credence. “Migration” could simply be a temporary effect of the pandemic. We may very well see young people come rushing back into SF for the same reasons as before.

And crime? You wouldn’t know it from HN threads but SF violent crime is again at all time lows.[1]

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/us/ca/san-francisco/crime...

I thought the move into SF was actually caused by a specific tax incentive around 2010, but don't remember the details.

Robinhood was in in Menlo Park / Palo Alto.

Here's a list of startups in Palo Alto: https://angel.co/location/palo-alto

Here's a list of startups in Menlo Park: https://angel.co/location/menlo-park

I'm sure if you have crunchbase pro you'd be able to do more analysis. But Silicon Valley is still pumping out a lot of startups, and high-tech firms.

Zoom is based in downtown San Jose.

They were over by Great America for a long, long time. Eric was used to Milpitas @ Cisco.

A lot of people forget that many now "elite" cities weren't that popular until relatively recently. Boston was losing population until well into the 90s and there was basically no tech left there by then.

When I graduated from grad school in the mid-80s, I don't think a single one of my classmates who got a job in Massachusetts lived in the city proper.

Yeah, living in cities was unpopular until about 2000 for a good reason - they were full of crime. Surprisingly it turns out giving the entire country lead poisoning was a bad idea.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...

Younger people then moved back in (causing superficial gentrification) because they couldn't live in the actual richer areas because those had all blocked new housing (actual gentrification.)

> Younger people then moved back in (causing superficial gentrification) because they couldn't live in the actual richer areas because those had all blocked new housing (actual gentrification.)

You're overlooking the qualitative motives for (somewhat incorrect) purely financial aspects. Younger people continued to move to denser parts of cities for at least a solid decade after in-city rents surpassed suburban ones. A large demographic group got married and started having kids much later than previous ones (this part traces pretty well back to economic factors, though!) so was looking for very different things in housing. As those factors started to change, they started following similar suburbanization patterns, and WFH accelerated that dramatically.

"Friends" is probably the clearest pop culture recording of this, showing the draw of living in the city for single 20-somethings in the 90s, and then the eventual appeal of the burbs for the later married w/ kids stage. Even in the 90s part of it, none of them were there because NYC was the cheap option.

Manhattan was something of an outlier. Even in not so great in a lot of ways 1980s Manhattan, a lot of people moved to "the city." This was especially true in finance. (Contra my comment about classmates not living in Boston proper, many lived in Manhattan proper. Of course, one difference is that the jobs were actually in Manhattan. )

But NYC has always had a singular appeal. And there was long a certain snobbery(?) about living in Manhattan specifically.

If we drop NYC we lose the easy TV show example, but I would still maintain that nobody young was moving to places like Midtown Atlanta or downtown Austin in the early 2000s just because they were priced out of the suburbs. Places were already "pay for the privilege of living somewhere denser and walkable" by that point.

Is this lead poisoning theory really any more proven than say, the access to birth control idea?

Young people tend to be economic migrants and the pockets of mass economic growth start in cities. They're also single and relatively poor so they live in multi-tennant housing near the downtowns where they work. As they get older, richer and more numerous (i.e. married w/ kids) they move out of the core. Cycle repeats with rising prices if growth is still there, or you hollow out the city and only the poorest remain. SF could stay like it is, or become a west-coast steel town, but it's unlikely to return to what it once was.

>the pockets of mass economic growth start in cities

It's varies over time. With SV-style tech that hasn't been the case until quite recently. And, in the Bay Area, arguably the nexus of jobs is still in the South Bay. And this sort of situation is true for many other areas as well.

Lets be real it was abortion

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion/

https://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-s...

It was not (or that was only some of it.) The same crime rise and fall happened worldwide - this is addressed in the article.

Continues to happen too. The parts of the world with the most terrorism like Iraq/Yemen also most recently had leaded gas.

Cities are full of crime again today. Is it a problem with lead? Or is it a larger condition of cities in the Americas?

> Cities are full of crime again today.

That doesn't seem to actually be the case, but crime statistics is a notoriously tricky area.

It is actually up a lot in 2020-2021 including murders and other “real” crimes.

There of course is also an effect where people think all of Portland is on fire because they saw a protest on TV once. But also Portland has had twice as much gun violence this year than all of 2020, which seems like a problem someone should do something about.

Most American cities are way, way below early 1990s violent crime levels, San Francisco included. SF had three times more homicides in 1993 than in 2019.

You saw around a 30% increase in homicide rates in large cities last year, and that increase began suddenly at the beginning of June. No environmental cause like exposure to lead can cause that.

The Mother Jones article referenced above is arguing that the most effective thing that can be done to combat crime is lead abatement, I think that argument has taken a fatal hit. Some cities are in fact seeing homicide rates close to or even above the 1990s rates, that happened suddenly and it happened after leaded gasoline had been banned for 45 years.

You can't explain the massive increase in homicide in large cities in 2020 using environmental factors like lead, the cause has to be cultural or political.

It went up a lot in 2020, quite possibly as a reaction to unemployment and especially not having anything else to do.

But yes, before that it was limited to a few hotspots like St Louis which still had environmental lead problems. Meanwhile DC in 1990 was more dangerous than the Iraq War.

At the time there were a lot more tech companies out along Routes 128 and 495. This is still true today, but now the balance has shifted to Boston and Camberville.

Yeah, all the minicomputer companies (which is where most of us went to work after school). I'd have actually considered living in Cambridge at the time but it would have been something like a 45 minute (reverse) commute whereas I had about a 5 minute commute until I bought a house.

Depending upon how you characterize tech, there's still a lot in the northern and western suburbs, especially if you include the defense contractors. But, yes, there's now a lot in Cambridge and the Seaport, especially, as well as all the biotech/pharma in and near Kendall Square.

> they were forced out of the valley by the real gentrifying force, homeowners that won't let anyone build more homes in case it causes traffic

Protip: Anti-housing activists will never tell you their real motivations: https://belonging.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/blacks_ch...

Some of it is immigration too: if you come from Paris or Berlin, you’re not going to want to move to Mountain View, given how ridiculously boring the peninsula is.

After growing up in central London, Silicon Valley was awesome. No more waiting for the bus, just drive everywhere, parking is easy, everywhere is safe. If you live in downtown Mountain View or Sunnyvale you can walk down the street to pubs and restaurants. Why live in SF with constant crime, begging and no parking, and a giant commute to Apple or Google?

If your employer's in South Bay you might as well live there. It's easier to commute to fun than commute to work.

San Carlos disagrees. Plenty of Europeans love this place.

And perhaps that new construction will reduce the market value of their homes, which they don't have to pay property taxes on and therefore regard as a substantial store of value.

Millions of people eat McDonald's hamburgers every day and we all understand why that drives the price of hamburgers down, not up. Demand doesn't make prices go up all on its own. The problem isn't demand; it's supply. The lack of supply is a policy choice -- emphasis on choice*; it's not a natural law -- and you've located the blame 90 degrees to its actual cause: existing homeowners* who benefit by restricting that supply.

People should be mad, but not at 22-year-olds coming from around the country looking for work. They should be mad at the millionaire rentiers who tell those kids when they show up that it's illegal for anybody to build them housing.

Tech didn't out price the people, nimby politics did. Average home owners in San Francisco have been owners for about 14 years. [1] Any new development basically hits a brick wall unless it's on a radioactive dump or ultra expensive downtown. You all remember the famous laundromat saga, those were not tech workers preventing new housing, the locals were. [2]

Anti gentrification policies almost always end up displacing the populations they are meant to protect. You don't want new apartments in a specific area because it may bring in newer crowds? Well guess what, those crowds will come any way, and now they can out price the people who live there.

Rent control is another problem, because long time residents won't move. And with no new inventory, the prices for pretty much any apartment that enters the market goes sky high. It's not the tech workers who displace the locals, they are anyway hunting for apartments in a different price range from the locals. It's the locals now just budgeting higher portions of their income towards rent and displacing other locals. This is exactly what happened in Berlin. [3]

And last but not the least, I think despite the nostalgia and how we remember SF differently from what it is now, yes there were quirky businesses all around. But there were only specific parts of the city that had them and quite frankly a lot of them just used to be replaced by newer businesses every couple of years. But what happened at some point was too much bureaucracy, red tape and politics crept into the cost of starting a business that now you have to sink almost a quarter of a million dollars before you can even start an ice cream shop. [4] It was partly the "locals" who created these problems.

[1] https://journal.firsttuesday.us/california-homeowners-are-st... [2] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/08/21/san... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-02/berlin... [4] https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/S-F-...

The laundromat saga happened largely because the owner of the laundromat was a jerk. You may think politics shouldn't work like that, that they rules should be based on the law and not who you are, but in San Francisco, that isn't how it works. I'm not defending it, but the laundromat was very much an example of a guy from Marin being a total jerk and then throwing a tantrum when he didn't get what he wanted.

> The laundromat saga happened largely because the owner of the laundromat was a jerk.

What should he have done differently that would have made the process work? Is it perhaps possible that his plans might have worked had he presented them with kindness, centered his words in compassion, and experienced a genuine blooming of human empathy? Greeted Calle 14 and Arguello with sympathy and real emotional engagement, acknowledging the legitimacy and validity of their concerns and pain, before refusing to donate?

Or was he a jerk because he didn't want to play ball with an unwritten shadow system that exists to make arbitrary and extrajudicial demands, and no amount of framing or emotional performance was going to make him into less of one? Can you help me understand?

I read the articles about Robert Tillman (e.g. https://missionlocal.org/2019/04/historic-mission-district-l...), and apparently the only thing he did that made him a “total jerk” was making a proposal to produce a necessity of life in a city with a desperate shortage, following all the zoning procedures to the tee, and refusing to concede to extortionary demands from politicians and other self-appointed gatekeepers.

By the way I never saw a “tantrum” from him; he followed the law methodically and for that he was ridiculed by the press as a deviant (“kamikaze” according to Joe Eskanazi https://missionlocal.org/2018/06/the-strange-and-terrible-sa...). He publicly shared his research (e.g. https://groups.google.com/g/sfbarentersfed/c/mHT2l4zDyKg/m/X...) and I think would have wanted his project to be an example to others of how to make the rule of law the norm in San Francisco, but that was not the agenda of the politicians and the press.

I get that people (such as Supervisor Hillary Ronen, gatekeeper Erick Arguello, and so-called “Progressive” journalist Tim Redmond) are upset about people profiting off the housing shortage. But if they are upset about a landowner making ~$130k per unit for investing in alleviating the shortage, they should be livid over every single homeowner in the neighborhood who sells a house for $2 million and makes more profit per unit without increasing the housing supply at all. That they asymmetrically target housing producers while remaining silent to idle speculators gives a perverse disincentive against creating housing and reveals a NIMBY preference by these so-called “Progressives”. In the end I think their advocacy does more harm than good in San Francisco even when it is in the name of capturing some value for the poor.

If he had not been a jerk, his project would simply have quietly failed. As it so happens, people reward non-jerk failure with a “that sucks, man” and a jerk failure with “haha!”. And that’s fine but both of those are both failures.

But the jerks succeed some of the time.

Rents are already rapidly going back up since their lows late last year, so don't hold your breath.

there's been a few new "below market rate" apartment and condos being built. Most all condo developments have BMR units but some of the new ones are 100% BMR

This is something that really bothers me - all those billions of dollars of tech money and you cannot find a way to house and support artists. New York billionaires have always found a way to support artistic endeavors. Case in point - Bloomberg, he personally donated a lot.

Funny you say that because when I lived in New York a few years ago gentrification and high rents was the top complaint among residents (mainly around the time Brooklyn started getting unaffordable), and people would point to San Francisco as a city which had a lot of money but could still keep its artsy/counterculture roots intact.

I think folks on either coast don't understand the nuances each city faces unless they live there. Whatever remains of SF working artists will say the city has long sold out its counterculture roots.

New York is possible for artists because of public transit.

Artists don't live in Manhattan, they live in the outskirts, or once were the "outskirts", and commute to where is needed because the MTA works (for the most part).

The Bay Area's transit system is a mess (too many different agencies with inconvenient transfers between lines) so affordable, yet accessible neighborhoods beyond Oakland/San Leandro/Richmond are nil.

How many billions of dollars of tech money, in your opinion, is enough to find a way to house and support people in a city where planning is fundamentally structured around finding ways to not house people?

In California you can get whatever crazy thing you want passed with O($10M). I bet $1B could get even Prop 13 overturned which would solve the housing disaster overnight.

2020's Prop 19 to reform property taxes just a bit had about $20 million behind it, and it didn't even land on the ballot.

SF would need to gut its entire permitting system. Today, it can't even make small and incremental improvements: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/Is-p...

> 2020's Prop 19 to reform property taxes just a bit had about $20 million behind it, and it didn't even land on the ballot.

Correction: in 2020, Proposition 19 (which limited Proposition 13/58 property tax breaks for parent-child transfers to only farms and owner-occupied “family homes”) did pass 51%-49%, whereas Proposition 15 (which would have eliminated Proposition 13 tax breaks for commercial property) was on the ballot but failed 48%-52%.

$20m and $1b is a significant difference.

You're absolutely right. That is a significant difference.

My point was that O($10m) isn't even enough to reliably land something on the ballot, much less get whatever crazy thing you want passed.

This of course being distinct from undoing Prop 13.

You'd need to end or severely restrict local zoning.

Everyone loves the idea of cheaper housing for people in theory.

Once they realize it means their own property value won't appreciate as quickly, or may even decrease and then suddenly they are against it. And they will vote out any officials that support it.

There needs to be state or federal intervention. And that doesn't seem likely at any time in the near future.

Zoning laws aren't laws of physics. Our tax policy is a huge incentive for the current zoning.

> all those billions of dollars of tech money and you cannot find a way to house and support artists.

Our problem is never that we don't have enough wealth, it's always that it's concentrated among a small percentage of the population, and a much larger percentage gets starved out entirely.

> New York billionaires have always found a way to support artistic endeavors. Case in point - Bloomberg, he personally donated a lot.

If we have to depend on the charity of billionaires, we've already lost the war.

Concentrated wealth sponsors high culture. There is extremely limited political will for public funding, and distributed personal spending decisions give you mass culture. You are not getting painters without people who spend tens of thousands on paintings. You are not getting the theater or the symphony or the opera without a class of attendees who write checks for hundreds of times more than a ticket is worth.

I could not agree more!

Because SF billionaires are selfish tourists. On the other hand, NYC has a long history of patronage and wealthy donors that contribute to making their city better.

Thankfully SF has people like Mark Zuckerberg, and is appreciative of his donation of a large amount of money to the city's hospital in order to improve life in the city.

Right?

That's what I was referring to. SF has the highest density of billionaires, but apparently they lack taste.

Lol. A billionaire doesn't give money to $causeOfTheDay - they're "selfish" assholes. They do give money - they're informed they can't buy forgiveness or they should have given more or the patronage is paternalistic and heaven forbid if the billionaire is a white male American.

May as well keep your money and let those fend for themselves.

Much better art created when people do it for the passion.. on their own time.. with their own resources.. after they've worked an 8 hour day.

Whingers are going to complain anyway - no point in affording them the time and resources to do it more.

All the great eras of any city were gritty. You can't have that with a generation of SodaSopans.

The article they cite (https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/People-are-leavi...) for claiming 10% of SF left is kind of misleading; 8 of the top 15 places they went to are _also_ in the bay area, and all but one was in California.

"SF residents move to Oakland and Berkeley" isn't a very exciting headline though

SF is on a different level of exodus then the rest of the Bay Area, and I guess also the state. The leadership of the city forgot there are also nearby cities that aren't trying out crazy new laws and mandates that obviously make everything much worse. One of the richest, most advanced places on Earth, making civic problems worse for decades now.

My Bay Area anecdote: a lot of my colleagues left over the past year, some are staying away, most are returning/have already returned. Not nothing, not an exodus though.

I think this so called "exodus" is temporary. Young people will come back to SF, it's the only city in the larger Bay Area which has culture and vibrancy. San Jose downtown area has plenty of potential, and it was seeing a renaissance pre-covid - google buying a lot of land and looking to expand is a good sign. I miss the SF of the early 2000s, where there was a bohemian quirkiness. Unless prices come crashing down it's highly likely any artist could sustain himself.

Everyone misses the SF of their youth. As will current residents.

I hear that a lot, “this was so much cooler 20 years ago”. I don’t thing people miss their city or neighborhood as much as they just miss their youth.

Oakland night life isn’t that bad :)

I moved from SF to Oakland last year during the pandemic, and honestly, Oakland is just as great as SF for restaurants, bars, and nightlife... as long as you have a car or method of transportation.

That is quite a caveat. Public transportation is a must to have a cultural scene that is both vibrant and not homogeneously upper-class at scale.

I’d say density is a must, and neither cities have it

SF is one of the most dense cities in the US. It’s pretty dense... If you’re expecting manhattan then that’s never going to happen and you should let people know Manhattan is the only place you consider a dense city.

There is a lot between SF and Manhattan in terms of of floor area / land area. The difference doesn't show up as obviously in the residential numbers because Manhattan has so much commercial relative to residential usage.

Paris or Seoul might be good goal posts for SF and the Bay Area; even outer-borough NYC is still more dense. Without arguing the merits of preservationism one way or another, SF could "look" the same and be a lot more dense if:

1) Garages are converted to apartments. Easiest and cheapest for the housing itself, but requires much better transit

2) The Sunset is raised up to not be shorter than the older parts of the city. Yes, that's a big change, but I think people are less sentimental about the little ticky tacky boxes than Victorians.

I find it vary interesting how old apartments like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consulate-General_of_Russia_in... amid a see of single family homes point to how before post-war suburbanization everything was set to densify with a look and feel like the tenderloin (the buildings themselves, when they were new, don't hate). Even the 60s modernist towers on e.g. Russian hill, for all their excessive parking and other issues, are bigger.

The thing to remember is NYC wasn't so different than the rest of the country pre-war. Rather it was farther ahead on the same trends, and when the trends abruptly reversed it was left was a critical mass of good transit to sustain "real urbanism" through stagnation and bad policy, while other cities weren't. Only after all that did such a stark dichotomy emerge.

I’m comparing it to cities outside the US, SF is not dense at all.

I know very little about the Bay area, so I'm not saying you're wrong. But I don't understand how that evaluation could be accurately made during the pandemic.

What neighborhoods? Downtown is pretty quiet.

Temescal, Macarthur, Lake Merritt. Piedmont and Rockridge are pretty good too, but on the calmer side.

Downtown Oakland is like downtown SF - I wouldn't go there for nightlife either. I'd go there for shopping.

EDIT: The blocks around 9th and Washington is pretty lively. It's like a giant party from 6pm onwards.

I lived in the south SF bay from 1985 to 2004. Things were already changing by the time I left, but it strange to hear SF being a tech center. Sure, tech workers loved visiting SF for food and culture, and some loved it enough to move there and put up with the daily commute south. Back then there were a few tech companies and tech-serving creatives (ad agencies and such), it wasn't a tech hub.

My guess is that this shift occurred in unison from the shift away from hardware startups (requiring deep-pocketed investors) to the current game of funding hundreds of small software/web startups and hoping one of them makes it big enough to pay for the losses of all the others.

Note I'm not saying the good old days were better or worse, just different.

It always struck me as odd that a culture so interested in the internet and data and disrupting existing cash flows would itself dictate a system in which so, so much cash flows from VCs to paychecks to landowners in one single metro.

Peter Thiel made the same point in 2018 and decided to focus his investments in other regions.

https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/peter...

Surprise: the landlords are in charge of local government.

Yeah, but AFAIK there isn't huge overlap between the VC funds and the landowners, unless there's some hidden corporate structure of which I am unaware.

It would be quite silly (and clever) for VC LPs to start buying up residential properties, knowing that their funding rounds go right into payroll and then right into SFBA rents and back into their pockets. :D

I don't think it's directly this malicious. I think it's more just a blindspot. If you're a 40-something partner at a major VC firm, who bought his home in Palo Alto in 2005, then the "cost of living" is largely invisible to you. Sure you may have a sizable chunk of home equity locked up, but that's not a monthly cash flow issue.

Intellectually you know that being located in the Bay Area is a major burden to the ramen-eating startup founders that you fund. But it's a lot easier to rationalize that away with justifications around "cross-pollination of ideas" and being in the "intangible benefits of being an innovation center". Certainly a lot easier when you're not worried about making rent on your 400 square foot studio.

> it's a lot easier to rationalize that away with justifications

- "It's a right of passage"

- "They'll look back on the struggle and smile"

- "It'll be worth it since the sacrifice will lead to success"

YC actually considered this (jokingly I think, but maybe not?). They realized that many of their startups were living in just a couple of high rises in San Francisco.

And VCs are also landowners

Wait... is ycombinator actually a real estate company? /s

Population decline was greater in 2018 and 2019 than 2020.

Even then it was tenths of a percent.

Are sure “exodus” is the right word?

It’s not. I was born and raised in the Bay Area, late 30s, have family in the city thats owned in the city proper since the 70s. My entire working career was in the peninsula, 10 of which in SOMA.

I don’t want to make this political it’s always been the same story ever since I was a kid. 1 - People who want to live here but priced out hoping to come at a “reasonable” price. 2 - Conservatives looking at the massive amount of talent, money, influence, power, and an intellectual power house of the world and finding any reason to possibly hate cause… we’ll I don’t know.

It’s fine. Nowhere is without issue, yes it’s gotten more expensive, but so has everyone salary. Dirty little secret to the outsiders, a lot of places are matching or competing with FAANG salaries, and even with cost of living being so high you make more in the BA then you would otherwise even after factoring out the roof over your head, in more then a few jobs by quite a healthy margin too

Most of the complaints I hear about SF are from residents and they ain’t conservatives.

People and companies leave SF because it's too expensive, SF gets less expensive, people and companies come back to SF, SF gets expensive...?

It's all about the short term profits. Look how much money we saved leaving SF! Then when the next execs come in it's, look how much money we saved going back to SF!

Except the difference is there's a hell of a lot more bandwidth available for telework in Colorado and Nevada than there was the last cycle.

Businesses shifting to partially or fully remote (the key metric surveyed in this article) isn't necessarily an exodus from SF. It just means a decline in the need for office space in SF.

Additionally, other sources indicate that most SF residents who left moved to nearby areas [1]. (Those areas themselves may see their residents moving elsewhere)

[1]: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/exodus-study-reveals-dra...

That's not really surprising. A lot of people like California and, if you don't need to worry about a daily commute, that opens up a lot of options that, if not exactly cheap, aren't as eye watering as the Bay Area.

> For almost as long as we’ve been tracking the COVID-19 pandemic, sf.citi has been closely monitoring the San Francisco tech exodus

They say 63 percent of tech companies surveyed have already downsized or plan to downsize their office space in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is to be expected in a work-from-home situation like the ongoing pandemic. I don't see anything about the percentage of it being permanent rather than temporary.

I took the pie chart next to the 63% one to be about the long term. So about half fully remote or substantially remote.

I am actually more surprised that 40% decided not to downsize given the WFH model that is popular now

One thing you're not accounting for is that companies normally plan for growth--whether or not that ends up happening. I expect a lot of companies that were likely exploring real estate expansion pre-pandemic have stomped on the brakes and will wait and see. So they may or may not downsize but they probably won't expand like they normally would have.

Downsizing is usually complicated and can be expensive and/or distracting.

Particularly if you don't think it will last long, I can see a bunch of companies taking a wait-and-see approach.

In 2020, San Francisco’s sales tax revenue dropped by as much as 70 percent in San Francisco’s downtown, which relies heavily on restaurants and hotels.

Mother of god...

This exodus is universally seen as a bad thing. For many stakeholders, it certainly is - restaurants, landlords, employers who need cheap labor, etc. For renters, it's a wonderful thing. For people commuting to SF on a daily basis, it's the best thing ever (either because they can move closer to work, or not commute at all and work from home, or simply deal with less traffic). I doubt that many people will disagree with these arguments.

Here's the contrarian part: I think that early-stage startups might benefit as well. After the dot com boom, the only people applying to startups were the die-hards. To some extent, you also noticed a better signal to noise ratio right after the housing crisis. I have no doubt that fewer startups will be started now in SF, and that fewer local people will apply for jobs. But it was never about the quantity and instead always about finding the needle in the haystack. I think there's a chance that the size of the haystack will shrink much more quickly than the number of needles.

I see a lot of skepticism about the Tech Exodus (techxodus?) in this thread but what I see is very real. The city is dead. It's a ghost town. The vibe went from amazing to pretty scary. Many of my friends have left for good. Moving to Texas, Florida, Hawaii, New York, Arizona and they all have no plans to return. Personally, I still, deep down inside really love California, even though its become a high tax hell hole. But I still love it. I love the climate, I love the topology of the area, I love the opportunity. The big Silicon Valley players will stay. Apple isn't going anywhere, Netflix, etc etc. So I've decided to get out of the city. So I'm moving to Silicon Valley to get away from the problems that are spinning out of control in the city. Personally I'm pessimistic about this decade and I see the way things are trending in the city. I just don't want to be there anymore. Its not a happy place, so the numbers outlined in this article aren't really that surprising.

Maybe it is an opportunity to convert some commercial space into residential space and make the City more affordable ?

If really so many companies are going remote, then all the commercial landlords would have to find ways to make money out of their commercial space.

Any reasons that could prevent it (e.g. stringent zoning code, preventing conversion from commercial to residential) ?

Its certainly possible to convert COM to RES but its not likely to happen at significant capacity unless the WFH trend really destroys commercial real estate.

Some obstacles are the basic requirements of housing (kitchen, bathroom, windows) don't really match office space. You need lots of water/waste/electric/hvac pipes distributed across a space for residential, not the same for commercial where they can be more centralized in the floor. The space distribution is also not the same - eg. "deep" buildings are worse for residential because the ideal window frontage to room depth ratios don't match - you can have a desk or communal space very far from the window in commercial real estate and its usable, but you can't really put residential rooms far from a window because no one wants a windowless room and laws usually prevent it.

Additionally, I've seen office windows that don't open but you usually need (by law) to allow opening windows for residential use (for ventilation purposes I think). This can be a VERY expensive fix. Most people also want windows that open too.

On the other hand, the way these are often overcome is with huge "loft-style" apartments - very high ceiling and large spaces. The bigger window height helps with the depth issues. The big spaces are then catered to rich people, who fund the massive Reno bills. (note: historically, lofts existed because artists could bypass zoning laws to live in warehouses they used as a studio, then it became trendy)

> This can be a VERY expensive fix.

The question for this sort of thing isn't how expensive it is absolutely but weather or not it's more expensive than building more housing in the area, and I doubt it's more expensive than that.

> The big spaces are then catered to rich people, who fund the massive Reno bills.

Ye Olde "luxury apartments are expensive" argument. If supply actually met demand then it would look more like the east coast where younger people with low salaries can afford these sorts of apartments with no roommates.

Hey, never said it couldn't happen, but this is why its not the first choice of developers... its totally possible. The parent just asked why its not readily done.

> but weather or not it's more expensive than building more housing in the area

that's for the market to decide. This area has very expensive office space, and you'd have to factor in the loss in revenue in office rent. of course, in a world where the offices stayed vacant, that's 0 anyways.

> look more like the east coast I lived on the east coast, the parts that people want to live often aren't cheap either (NYC, Bos, etc). They're also not increasing housing by much.

> Ye Olde "luxury apartments are expensive" argument

This wasn't an argument against, its more a "where does this money come from" point. Expensive things are expensive to produce. Thankfully they're expensive so they can cover construction expenses. SF needs more new luxury housing so people with lots of money stop living in existing housing, leaving room for poorer people. No one would build market rate housing when there are millionaires living in rundown walkups.

That would make it easier for people with money to move in.

The best way to ensure fair and equitable housing is to constrain the supply as much as possible.

We don’t need to worry though, the zoning and planning departments will definitely SF from the tyranny of new housing units.

What happens to tech hubs now that tech stock prices have already been priced with future growth in mind? When people like me got tech jobs 2+ years ago, stock prices were low and stock grants were set accordingly. Now, new grads are likely going to get less shares and won't see the sort of windfall that previous generations received. Will this put downward pressure on real estate prices or reduce the overall draw of the Bay Area?

If you worked at (eg.) FAANG 2 decades ago, someone might say said this.

If you worked at FAANG a decade ago, someone might say said this.

If you worked at FAANG in 2019, someone might say this.

Its now 2021 and you just said this.

Sure the windfall might not be what they were years ago for any one example company, but that "priced for growth" isn't a single event - people will still see some windfall since growth will probably still happen.

[Anecdote]: pros of SF bay area is that it is a large metro area where tons of businesses have point of presence. No complaints re. the climate and the geography.

However crime and overall cleanliness are bad even though the cities must be rich with cash and this is coming from someone who used to live in a "third world" country (even though the term original usage wasn't about wealth).

So some meaningful changes in policy need to happen.

Anyone sign an office lease recently? Any negotiation tips?

I’m looking for new space in SF, moving from a current lease near Union Square to something bigger.

I never enjoyed SF or the Bay Area. I reluctantly moved there for work. I'm very glad the pandemic gave me an opening to leave :)

It's kind of funny reading this, as I know someone from my Midwestern state who decided to move to SF in the middle of the pandemic. I'm curious as to what happens once everything reopens, will people move back, or is this a permanent change?

There is no amount of money that I would take to live in that abomination of a city.

If you want a $15 salad for lunch from a crappy salad chain, just work in SF! You'll few lines and plenty of outdoor seating all to yourself.

If you stay, you're a gentrifier. If you leave, then it shows you were never committed to this place anyway.

Why wouldn't you stay?

Good? Always seemed problematic so much tech was all tied up in SF and the Bay Area.

It is the only true city in the area, where younger people can have a urban lifestyle... the rest is depressing suburbia.... San Jose, and the rest feels like a cultural grave. The only other town that is walkable is Berkley, but that is too small for hosting large companies. Also, parts of Oakland, but the city itself has major governance issues, and crime in general.

I think NYC and Austin are booming right now. While nyc is a world class city, the 'progressives' have taken over the NY State legislation, and personally it is worrying.

While some of the legislation might be long overdue, and good, there are many parts of the 'progressive' movement that is just nihilistic, and destructive in the long run and it might end up goin the route of SF. So, this year will be the wait and see year on how NY will move forward. If it goes the way of SF (with destructive policies) it might not look good.

But, NYC-ers are more rational, and both of the leading candidates for Mayor seem to be more in the centrist, or center left camp, and the far left / super progressive ones are not doing well.

NYC is just about as bad at housing as the Bay Area is, but the problem hasn't gone on for as many decades so you haven't noticed yet. NYC population is actually shrinking for this reason, and there are several silly rules (not by modern progressives) like high IZ for "affordability" that prevent all construction, and I think they're about to essentially ban new hotels.

Btw, the reason progressives didn't take over before is that Cuomo was actually conspiring to make his own party the minority in the legislature, because he thought if he was forced to ever actually do anything it'd hurt a future presidential run.

When you have young kids 'depressing suburbia' can be a feature not a bug.

Until they need to go places during the day and your whole life becomes dedicated to driving them around.

Seems worth the additional safety and access to nature. Especially considering the alternative in my case (SF.)

The leading cause of death in children is driving.

Especially in the suburbs, I'd imagine, which would imply they're largely avoiding other causes. Great! What you should care about is P(D|city) vs P(D|suburb)

Children really shouldn't be driving in the first place.

> and crime in general

That's no different in SF

I thought Oakland was worse

Oakland is a big place. It varies by neighborhood same as San Francisco. Most is fine, certainly no worse than the Tenderloin.

I'm living in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Oakland, and I would definitely not consider it "fine". The area is beautiful, but we're plagued by gunpoint robberies, burglaries, dumping, etc — people coming in and treating us as a place to loot and leave.

I love Oakland, but I'm gone as soon as our rent is up. There's a general lawlessness here that's incredibly frustrating.

I'm sorry you've had that experience, where I lived in Oakland nothing like that happened with any regularity. And I did not live in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Oakland.

But I mean, it is a city. These things happen in cities, I just don't see how it could credibly be claimed to be worse than San Francisco when the geographical variability is so high.

Anything I saw in Oakland was no worse than any other city I have ever lived in. I don't really know a better way to put it, I'm not saying it's perfect, I'm saying it's as fine as anywhere else of comparable density.

My friend lives in the Oakland hills which is one of the nicest areas in oakland. His car has been stolen three times in the past five years. They’ve had an attempted break in and a contractor they hired had his truck stolen. Oakland is a hell hole.

That's not exactly a high bar

And the vast majority of Oakland is fine. I used an extreme example to demonstrate that the idea that Oakland has worse crime issues than SF is highly dependent on where you happen to be. Oakland is just physically huge, suggesting it has an issue with "crime in general" is myopic and ignores that almost all of it is fine, same as SF.

How does SF have so many neighborhoods when it's so small, anyway? You can walk across the city and back in a day.

How big does a neighborhood need to be / how many should it have?

The neighborhoods in SF as most people think of them are larger than the areas that many suburb residents tend to think of as defining their neighborhoods.

All of the cities you mention have progressive leadership and that's not likely to change. Most non-progressives have decamped to the suburbs (or "depressing suburbia" as you call it) decades ago.

"San Francisco’s office vacancy rate has risen to 19.7 percent"

Wow -- when I was there in the "dot-com boom" of the late '90s and early '00s, such a vacancy rate was unheard of (it was 0.5% for housing, and similar for commercial real estate).

Oh well, they've earned this outcome.

At those vacancy rates, the only thing holding up rents is the overwhelming amounts of liquidity in the economic system. Land owners still have cash, in other words. Back in 2001, I rented an office for free. The landlord could then reduce his property tax rate by showing the city that it was occupied at zero rent. Stranger things might happen this time around with 20% vacancy.

What's awful is asking rents have barely budged. Peaked at around $85/sf, now around $75/sf. The landlords can afford to just sit on inventory.

Totally false. We saw many commercial units between $35-50/sf IG and just signed on one at $37/sf.

"At the first quarter of 2021, the overall citywide asking rent was $73.76 per square foot (psf) down 12.0% from the peak of $83.82 psf with the Class A citywide figure at $77.66 psf, down 10.0% from $86.31 psf,. Direct space continues to be marketed at near record levels for the time being with the citywide Class A direct asking rent at $84.47 psf and the CBD Class A direct asking rent at $85.71 psf" — Cushman and Wakefield

"Totally false" — Internet rando

> Cushman and Wakefield

Aka a company with a vested interest in convincing you that the $75 price they are offering you is totally in line with the average and it's really good and you should just take it.

But an anecdote about a class-C storefront on 7th street is more reliable?

I'd say both are anecdotes with bias, but honestly, the random internet commenter has less incentive to massage the data than WC.

Also, are these figures factoring in things landlords are doing now to sweeten the deal without dropping the per month/sq price?

I.e giving months away for free or other incentives like that? Anecdotally I’ve heard office rent is way down as well.

"What's awful is asking rents have barely budged. Peaked at around $85/sf, now around $75/sf. The landlords can afford to just sit on inventory."

This is because their loan-to-value ratio is based on their square foot rental rates. If the unit sits empty they, of course, lose money ... but if they rent it at market price they could lose the property entirely with a (for lack of a better term) margin call.

If the value of the building ratchets down and blows up their loan covenants, it is better to have it sit empty and lose money slowly ...

The situation you're describing is lose-lose-lose, which makes me skeptical that it describes what's actually happening.

The landlord loses out on rent payments (albeit at a lower monthly rate).

The lending institution loses because the default rate increases if landlords stop collecting rent.

Renters also lose due to artificially inflated prices.

What's stopping the landlord and lender from re-negotiating loan covenants to enable the landlord to collect lower rent payments for a period of time without triggering a new valuation?

Some loans are backed by certain rent levels. So commercial real estate owners don't have as much freedom to reduce their prices as you might think.

Commercial leases are often multi-year. If they expect the high vacancy rates to evaporate within a year or two, why would they drop the rates now to fill the vacancy?

Long overdue.

Oh good, the city I left Seattle for a couple years ago is not mentioned anywhere on this list. My rent has one less factor to push it into unaffordability.

There is now enough vacant office space in San Francisco to give every homeless person in the city 2000 square feet.

(From the article: 16 Million square feet of vacant office space, and a quick Google search gave me a homeless population of 8000)

There's always enough X in San Francisco to give every homeless person X/n of it.

What's lacking in San Francisco is the political will to do anything meaningful about homelessness (or crime, or the housing crisis, or infrastructure, or the schools or anything other than vague virtue signaling)

To their credit, they've found new ways of using resources in the most inefficient way possible.

"San Francisco is paying $16.1 million to shelter homeless people in 262 tents placed in empty lots around the city where they also get services and food — a steep price tag that amounts to more than $61,000 per tent per year."

https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-...

At that cost they could just pay the homeless 61k per year and they could rent their own homes

That was my first thought as well but then remembered that often the reason for homelessness is mental health issues. Many homeless people are just incapable of taking care of themselves.

e.g. not paying rent/bills when they physically have the money to do so, gambling addict so getting into massive amounts of debt, getting evicted due to antisocial behaviour/vandalism of property.

Maybe that's the case, but instead why not rent apartments on behalf of the homeless people, put them there, and get them evaluated and treated by a mental health professional?

Living in an actual building rather than a tent in a parking lot ("protected" or otherwise) seems like a great first step and healing some of those mental health issues.

When the treatment starts working to a degree that the formerly-homeless person can be trusted with the cash, give it to them, along with the rent bills.

Convert the empty real estate to the mental health facilities that Reagan emptied?

While I imagine there are a lot of detractors here, I like universal basic income. We could try to slice it and have a system to pick and choose who gets it, but as we've seen, the waste that goes into the bureaucracy when it's not just "give everyone a check".

Not if there isn't enough housing.

I always wonder what the point of these comparisons is. Can you imagine cramming 8000 homeless people with hardcore drug addictions and untreated mental illness in a vacant office tower?

It would make for a hellofa janitor survival simulator game. Maybe as a story pack to SimTower.

Note most of them aren't homeless because they did drugs, they're doing drugs because they're homeless because they lost their homes. Ain't nothing else to do.

I was curious about this claim. A 2004 study of ~500 homeless adults in Pennsylvania found that roughly 70% reported that they did not use more drugs after becoming homeless, though about 80% reported regularly using drugs [1]. But there are other studies that claim the opposite, for example this 1990 study of ~1400 homeless adults in California that finds "[p]revalences of alcohol abuse, illegal drug use, and psychiatric hospitalization when adults first became homeless were 15% to 33% lower than prevalences following homelessness". But it's hard to dig into the second result, because the paper is paywalled, like most of the papers about this topic.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448345/

[2] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.82.10...

Isn't it already well established SF has far more space allocated to jobs than housing for the workers?

In other news, the sky is blue, and water is wet.

What’s your prediction for the outcome of doing that? Parceling the office space into 2,000 square foot spaces and giving them free of charge to each homeless person in SF? Please be specific.

Is that an accurate count? That actually sounds surprisingly low. I figured it was quite a bit higher.

That's nearly 1% of the population of San Francisco. It's already shockingly high.

What would a homeless person do with an office?

Start a SoLoMo app company, obviously.

That's great to hear!

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