On Leaving California and the Silicon Valley
bartwronski.com
bartwronski.com
- Weather: The Bay Area has none. The changing seasons and large variations in weather they brought was something the writer missed.
- Culture (or lack thereof): The Bay Area has none. The main leisure activities in the Bay Area are centered around enjoying nature and food . There is no music, or art scene of any sort.
- Public Transport (or lack thereof): The Bay Area has none. This means that many weekend hours are spent getting to a particular place where the leisure activity (which is already not to the taste of the writer) will occur, and this also entails advance planning!
- Variety (or lack thereof): There is a lack of variety, whether it be in the type of people encountered, the conversations, the cities/suburbs, or the scenery.
- Affordability (or lack thereof): Flimsy, modest houses cost north of a million bucks minimum. Everything that requires human labor is stratospherically expensive.
- Politics: Even though the writer is ostensibly of a similar persuasion as most Bay Area residents (left-leaning liberal), the actual policies and attitudes of Bay Area residents are heavily arrogant, technocratic, plutocratic and short-sighted.
All of the observations ring true. But the overall impression I got was that the author really did not or could not change himself, and expected something the Bay Area never offered in reality.
I experienced this same feeling in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Every day the sky and air are almost exactly the same, day-in-day-out. I was very ready for some seasons and weather when I got back to the UK.
On variety of conversations, Oakland, Berkeley, Vallejo, Fremont, Cupertino, Mountain View, San Jose, Belmont, South San Francisco and Sausalito offer drastically different bar talk with friendly strangers.
Oakland and Berkeley keep the area just above fourth tier.
Compare this to the era that gave us that little-known Palo Alto band, the Grateful Dead.
I've never seen a show a Levi's or Shoreline.
I guess your complaint is there aren't more artists coming out of Palo Alto? Yeah, sure, I'll concede that if I lived in Palo Alto I'd probably be unhappy with its music scene.
Not stadiums or sports arenas that host Top 40s mega-acts like Britney Spears and Lady Gaga, but also not the local coffee shop that has a guy play some guitar covers on Friday nights.
Venues that I'm happy to go to: Bottom of the Hill, The Chapel, Hotel Utah, The Rickshaw Stop, The Independent, August Hall, Swedish American Hall, Great American Music Hall, The Fillmore, Bimbo's 365, Warfield, The Fox, The Masonic.
You got me. DNA Lounge does have a special place in my heart though. JWZ was such a slashdot folk hero, its sad that so many people in SF don't know who he is anymore.
I also can't think of anywhere else in SF that is keeping the dream of the 90s alive the way DNA lounge does.
That's not really "weather" though in this context. Here in Southern Michigan, I don't have to plan for, or travel to, changes in the weather. Same thing with seasons in general. As I go about my daily life, the weather around me is constantly changing from day to day. More broadly, the changing of the seasons punctuates the passing of time, and is the scaffolding upon which most of us hang our social lives on. It does all this because weather and the seasons just happen to us, we don't have to go find it.
As an example to go along with the article's point. I visited SoCal to see a friend of mine who moved out there a few years prior. It was my first visit to SoCal, and it took place during a September. For the week I was out there the temperature was the same every day and every night. What caused me the most discomfort though was during that whole week I didn't see a single cloud in the sky.
You mean microclimates. A microbiome is "the microorganisms in a particular environment (including the body or a part of the body)".
I'm not Polish, but I'm another European living in the Bay Area as well, and I don't think your comment reproduces what the author is trying to say, most likely through no intention of your own.
I won't repeat the same mistake by giving my own summary, but I understand too well the weirdness and isolation that suburbs and zoning laws give compared to European cities. It's totally weird, but I live in San Francisco, a dense city, and the zoning laws and "built for cars" layout[1], as well as spreading the population over California style suburbs, still make me feel more like I'm living in some backwater village. After close to a decade of living here now.
[1] I think European cities are just "lucky" that they've mostly been built when cars weren't a thing yet, and also organically grew over much longer timespans.
Yes. That's it. This is what a lot of people critical of the design (or execution) of US cities don't seem to understand. This also applies to the many failed attempts to make mass public transportation --and the reduction of automobile-based transportation-- a thing.
Cities evolve. And these cities are no exception. By the time they reached scale it became pretty much impossible to re-engineer them to fit a new vision of how things should be.
The best example I have is the absolutely failed California high speed train. We are about a hundred billion dollars into it and have nothing usable in place. I believe they built about ten miles of low speed track that you can't even use yet. To make things even more interesting, it was supposed to cost ten billion (that's how it was sold to voters).
This high speed train goes through so many towns and counties, each with it's own rules and issues, that the probability of it ever approximating something like the TGV or the Eurail ICE I usually take from Amsterdam to Munich during my visits is kind of laughable at best.
We'll see what happens at a trillion dollars, I guess.
Where I'm pretty critical however is zoning laws. That just seems unnecessary to me. The fact that even in a city I have to travel a large distance just to go to the nearest supermarket, to get a haircut, or to even just sit down in a café, is a bit maddening. This means I literally have to take my car just to go to Safeway here--which is weird at least to me.
As for the cafés, I'm not even sure whether zoning laws would prevent them from popping up in residential areas, but I suspect even if they were allowed, they would be sparse because of the overall effect of zoning. Residential areas mostly only consist of homes, and you are pretty much either in your specific home of that large zone, or out in another zone anyway. So there would probably be little incentive.
A counterpoint to the California high speed rail situation is that Poland has been building new expressways to connect its major cities. This has been an enormous undertaking with enormous success. Huge swaths of farms, forests and villages are being bulldozed to make way. The needs of the many...
You should give Howard Kunstler‘s The Geography of Nowhere and Duany, et al.‘s Suburban Nation a read. (There are other good ones, too). They’d readily dispel the timing notion you suggest. Rather this bland outcome is clearly from adopting civil engineering and planning codes intentionally.
There is plenty of live music in the Bay. Example: https://thefillmore.com/
Public Transport (or lack thereof): The Bay Area has none
Wrong. The South Bay has Caltrain, the East Bay has BART. SF has... a few systems, but mostly Muni.
Variety (or lack thereof): There is a lack of variety, whether it be in the type of people encountered, the conversations, the cities/suburbs, or the scenery.
Very untrue. Try visiting Oakland, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Santa Cruz and see if you think they are the same.
Affordability (or lack thereof): Flimsy, modest houses cost north of a million bucks minimum. Everything that requires human labor is stratospherically expensive.
The situation is the same in NYC. Housing is expensive.
This is the lowest expectation one could have for a music scene.
> The South Bay has Caltrain
Damning with faint praise.
The Caltrain is literally a single railway line.
I think this reasonably approximates to no public transport system.
It is entirely accurate to say that there is literally _no_ public transport for major routes, for part of the day.
Also within the city, to access most parts you have no BART or other train, you only have Muni. And if you've ever tried to take it without the help of an app like Transit (or even with the help of the app) it's pretty unreliable and can be difficult to figure out. Compare to Taipei or even NYC where you can more or less jump on a train that arrives at regular intervals, at any time, and get to most parts of the city.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my guess is that you have never lived for a significant time in a major (or even smaller) European or Asian city? Where I come from, pretty much everyone, everyone, uses public transport all the time. To go to work, to go to any leisure activity, to do some quick shopping. And it's extremely clean, modern, and convenient (yeah, people complain, they do all the time, but they complain that it's 10 minutes late in the deepest winter and then still use it daily).
That's just not feasible in the Bay Area. You are screwed here if you don't have a car, where as when I lived as a fully grown adult in Europe, I and many of my peers did not even have a driver's license (getting one is expensive, time intensive, and usually plain not necessary). Many others had a driver's license but no car. Now I need a car just to go to the supermarket because there isn't any in a walkable distance.
I have to say the subway system in Manhattan is indeed the closest I've seen compared to the European or Asian systems I'm familiar with, even though it still looks pretty "industrial" and somewhat run down.
all you’re measuring is living closer to a city center. and the larger the city the better the story. if you live in the burbs in either location you get a suburb experience
Once I stayed with my in-laws in Sanxia Taiwan, an exurb of Taipei. When we wanted to get to Taipei 101 (37km away), we took public transit. When we wanted to get to the historic district (26 km away), we took public transit. When we wanted to get to Tamsui (a bucolic oceanfront suburb, 42km away), we took public transit. When we wanted to get to Banqiao (the main shopping district, 16km away), we took public transit.
From the mid-peninsula, this is equivalent to going to San Francisco; going to downtown San Jose; going to Half Moon Bay; and going to Stanford Shopping Center. You can actually get to the first two through Caltrain, but you'll walk about a mile to get to the Caltrain station, rather than half a block to get to a bus that comes every 10 minutes. You can't effectively get to HMB, Stanford Shopping Center, or any of the other non-city-center through public transit in the Bay Area.
That's what foreigners tend to complain about with the walkability of American cities. It isn't the difficulty of getting from dense, built-up city centers to top tourist destinations. It's the difficulty of getting from common, ordinary residences to the next tier of destinations.
I just looked on Google Maps. Assuming that I can only walk and take public transport getting to Stanford Shopping Center from where I grew up takes 5x longer than driving, Half-Moon Bay 4x longer. For contrast getting to London from any surrounding area and vice versa is generally faster by public transport when compared to driving (even when that trip involves buses).
It simply isn’t comparable. The infrastructure might exist in theory, but it is not very usable.
For every St Pancras there are lots more Gare du Nord.
Convenient, yes. Modern--sometimes. Clean--occasionally.
Americans are so cute in their assumption that what they have aside from cars is a public transport.
Fewer people in SF work in tech than is often perceived, but the social circles are very clique-y and exclusive. It creates perceptions about the entire city that are really only true for one’s friend groups.
I wonder what it is about the design/culture of SF that makes that the case.
This is a great take. I was driving back into SF this week. As always, the green population sign stuck out to me. There are fewer than 1 million SF residents. Part of this is because it’s only 49 square miles, but the fact is you’re exactly right. SF may be urban, but it isn’t dense.
This rings true to my experience as well. I only managed to make friends with some fellow engineers after living there for a few years.
And it's not for lack of trying, I joined sports teams, wide variety of meetups, social clubs and tried to chat to strangers I encounter.
It seems people are generally not interested in adding another engineer to their friend circle, except fellow engineers. It's quite ironic because my interests are actually more athletic and artistic than geeky.
But variety? That one just is weird. Within a couple hours driving distance is a vast array of hugely different environments. Within bart-ing distance is a huge variety of very distinct neighborhoods and cultures.
And the comparison of living in Poland and being able to walk from the suburb across city districts to having to drive or take a long train ride from Palo alto to Sf doesn’t make sense. I doubt he walked 25 miles back in Poland. I lived in a small German town for while, it also took 1.5 hours to train into cologne. I could walk across cologne like I do SF. But I could not walk to cologne from Juliche. And driving would have been much faster than taking the train, just like driving from PA to SF is.
His points about suburbs are mostly accurate, but sounds like he was in the wrong spot in the bay. Oakland/Berkeley/sf are better than Palo Alto or the South Bay for actually walking to bars and places. He also doesn’t like the brown looks Mediterranean climates have, so NY does sound like a better fit.
It's winter. We have deciduous trees in Northern California... In autumn they turn orange, and they spend winter without leaves! A foreign concept in LA, where most of the trees are palms or coral trees or other evergreens.
It's true that we don't get snow like many European cities. But I guess the presence or lack of "seasons" depends on what you're used to.
But the majority of Americans and Europeans hail from places that have much more delineated (and varying) weather across the four seasons, the Bay Area seems lacking in comparison.
I think this is pretty unfair, he's just giving context for the things he's experienced elsewhere. It could have been anywhere. It's hard to say what you like and dislike about a place without having another experience for contrast.
The story is not, "I came from Warszawa, SF was not like Warszawa, so I went back to Warszawa." The story is, "I came to SF, and I loved it, but we think NYC is a better fit for the lifestyle my wife and I want to live."
Wrong. Plenty of music in SF. Lots in Oakland too. Great shows at the Greek in Berkeley, or big acts at Shoreline (kinda meh the last few years though), Levi's Stadium, or San Jose. If you enjoy chamber or symphonic music, you get it year-long at Stanford, Music@Menlo, and more.
I would add that I found it personally stifling to be in an environment where there's a lot of pressure to be constantly upbeat and positive.
It feels related to the culture of competition, but not feeling free to express anything negative made me feel socially suffocated when I was in California. Maybe it's in part because I grew up in an environment where sardonic humor was a go-to coping mechanism, but pretending that bad things aren't there makes me feel worse about them.
I think there's a balance to be had: I'm grateful that the experience forced me to think more about when I use negative humor (or just complaining/saying negative things that aren't funny), how it can affect people in different ways based on their personal backgrounds and personality. But I don't think California is for me.
I step into a conference room to call my wife to ask if she had done it, and she says, "Yes, it was a retainer, I'm divorcing you."
The weirdest thing was going back to work and pretending nothing was going on. I was dead inside for two weeks at least. Couldn't take time off. Couldn't afford to quit. Just had to sort of sit there and pretend everything was fine.
I hope you are in a better place now, but if not, you'll get there.
And believe me I understand "the ex-wife did me dirty" :-)
> Unfortunately, suburbs typically mean zero walkability
I grew up in the Bay Area so I think I know how to do it: An electric bike makes most of the pain go away. I've been exploring South Bay since moving here and finding all kinds of cool things on my bike that are invisible by car (walking is not an option, author is right about that.) Just the other day I rode to the San Jose Diridon train station, threw my bike on Caltrans and spent the day riding my bike around San Francisco. Electric bike is the only way to explore SF in my opinion. I'm going to buy a second battery for my bike soon, then put my bike on Bart and go to Berkeley where I went to University. There's a bunch of interesting stuff there. You don't need a car to avoid being stuck in the suburbs.
tldl; Get an electric bike and learn the public transport system
And yes, bikes are great, but some of us prefer to galavant around without a multi-thousand dollar liability to keep locked up. Also, I was usually at least half drunk.
I'm mapping the bike lockers in the Bay Area. Slide your card and put your bike in a steel box.
People don't live in the suburbs because they want access to museums and night clubs for themselves. They give up their own happiness for the sake of their children. They buy a more expensive home to put their children into a higher-achieving school. They live in a remote cul-de-sac so their children can safely ride bicycles and shoot hoops in the driveway. Their idea of "going out" is a drab, desiccated local park in the foothills because it is safe and healthy, not because it's fun or diverse. They put pressure on their kids to succeed so they can afford to live in this area when they grow up and repeat the cycle to become well-paid professionals and suburban parents. People pursue this stressful and family-focused lifestyle away from big, busy cities precisely because they want the same for their children, or better.
When the author says that there is no clubbing or spontaneity in Silicon Valley, he demonstrates just how out of touch he is with our local communities, and how little he understood the motivations of the people living here. It makes all the sense in the world for him to move away and find a better fit for his personality! I hope he likes New York better! People live here because they are executing a very precise and demanding life plan for the sake of the next generation, not because they want to be spontaneous and fun. We don't need that here.
I was responding to the sentiment that people don’t enjoy living in the suburbs, that they only move there in order to raise kids. I don’t even have kids I just don’t like living in big cities.
HN is so odd sometimes.
**
As noted, those are my preferences. Suburbs have “objective” problems, strip malls and parkings are ugly, cars are not eco friendly etc – but yes, there are people who love suburbs, relative safety (in US it’s a problem – at least a perceived one), having a large house, clean streets, and say that it’s good for family life. I cannot argue with anyone’s preferences and I respect that – different people have different needs. But I’d like to dispel a myth that suburbs are great for kids. It might be true when they are 1-10 years old, later it gets worse. As I mentioned, when I was ~14 I moved to suburbs – and I hated it… I think that for teenagers, it’s bad for their social life and ability to grow up as independent humans. Now being an adult, I think my parents have a very nice house and a beautiful garden and I can appreciate chilling there with a bbq – but back then I felt alone and isolated, and if it wasn’t for my friends in other parts of the city and great public transport, I’d be very miserable. Which teenager wants to be driven around and “helicoptered” by parents and have whole life revolving around school and “activities”?
**
South Bay (or at least Cupertino/Sunnyvale) is extremely teen-friendly. Lots of opportunities to hang out. You see groups of teens moving independently between local bubble tea shops, cafes, libraries, and town parks. Who do you even think patronizes the dozens of bubble tea shops and light snack places in the area, if not kids hanging out after school?
The author's arguments about suburbs being bad for kids are that (a) he had an unhappy childhood and (b) that kids here have a high risk of suicide. The first is not something I can argue with, the second is simply false. Apart from the cluster of suicides at Palo Alto high schools in 2014, there has not been an elevated rate of suicide among local schoolchildren. Heck, I remember more suicides at my completely mediocre high school in urban New Jersey in the late 90s. It is a shame the author is perpetuating what is essentially an urban legend and a TV pundit talking point.
The reality is, any interest my kids want to pursue, they basically have the best possible resources at their fingertips. The robotics team will have a coach who is an award-winning roboticist. If they're into marine ecology or music production or whatever, one of their classmates will have a parent who's a marine ecologist or the sound engineer for Stanford's theater program.
Compare that to anywhere else in the country, where basically any hobby or interest your child pursues is limited to, like, the Boy Scouts or hanging out at the old shopping mall.
- Some of the best high schools in the country. Many teachers have advanced degrees in their fields. A direct connection to Stanford and Berkeley. Courses beyond AP Calculus available for children to take.
- You can raise your children in the church. You do not seem to understand what a luxury it is to have a vast choice of local churches, where many people you meet are doctors, engineers, lawyers, and other influential professionals. The Bay Area is composed of lots of tightly knit communities where people can exchange experiences, favors, and insights with others they can trust and relate to. Maybe you weren't able to break into one, so you couldn't see the benefits?
- You overstate the pressure on local kids. Aside from a couple of tragic incidents at Palo Alto High several years ago, children in the area have lots of opportunities to hang out in bubble tea shops and cafes, visit friends, participate in sports, and basically do whatever they want to. The unique luxury of living in the Bay Area is that if you kid is over at a friend's house, you can rely on the mom to say, "Sure, you can play Zelda, but first let's do an hour of homework!" This unique and amazing culture of high achievement is what drives parents to the area at any cost.
But one thing that is not just matter of cultural background and preferences, but of facts and ongoing research - is that pressure, high expectations etc. do have a devastating effect on teenagers' mental health and mental wellbeing.
The way parents in South Bay raise their kids might seem hardcore, but it gets results. Many families come here from overseas with nothing and spend many years working in dismal jobs with low pay, all to give their kids a chance at success. We have some of the best schools and some of the highest rates of attending elite universities in the entire country. The FAANGs are stocked with graduates from local high schools. Many families have parents who work at Apple and other well-established companies. We live in wholesome, family-friendly, welcoming communities. If you ever decide to have kids, we would be happy to welcome you back to the area!
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/278727-my-dinner-with-...
Having grown up in the South Bay and then having moved to Europe myself I think that lots of parents in the Bay Area really don’t understand this, and props to you for doing so (even though you aren’t a parent). Sure plenty of kids end up being extremely high achievers. Plenty of kids also crack under the pressure and spend their formative years hating themselves.
Sure it’s a cultural thing, but it’s a cultural thing that actively hurts children.
This sentence makes total sense for North Korean parents who work super-hard to afford smuggling their kids out of the country. But not for the richest region of the world superpower and the "citadel of democracy".
> "They put pressure on their kids to succeed so they can afford to live in this area when they grow up and repeat the cycle to become well-paid professionals and suburban parents"
I'd understand if they lived in a poor country, where being a "non well-paid professionals" meant constant suffering. But if a person "sacrifices" themselves so their kids can afford fancy car, hmm, something is suspicious here, isn't it? :-)
Also, are you implying that there is anything wrong with living a lifestyle without kids? Why would I want to raise a child in a world that will be undergoing tumultuous climate change over the next 100 years.
I mean - is anyone really looking for that in places that are definitely known as places that people move to in order to raise children? It's a really weird complaint. If you wanted booze and the kid vibes - guess you could move to San Carlos.
I wonder if the people complaining about lack of good food are mostly talking about good food at a certain price point or just certain cuisines - because I don't have many issues finding good restaurants here whereas in some other major cities it can be a real struggle to find anything that is at the same level.
There's another side. California is also much friendlier to the homeless and devotes way more resources to even trying to care for them. Meanwhile, the rest of America ships their homeless to a handful of destinations, with California's major population centers being top targets.
Much like there are some people in this society/world that we will have personality clashes with regardless I believe there are cities in this world that we will have the same personality clashes with. It grates, it wears you down and after a while you have to leave. I often feel affinity or antipathy within minutes of leaving the airport of a particular city. The SFBA was a 'wtf have I done by moving here, ok I'll give it a couple of years to warm to it' and although there was lots to love I never connected on a deep level. It's a subjective personal thing for which there is no wherefore.
Just saying, the best regional Indian food of all types is right across the river in NJ.
I would appreciate more perspectives from parents and families. Do you use strollers (and take them on the bus) or just carry babies everywhere? If you need to buy things at the market, do you take your two-year-old or leave them at home? Do you buy furniture or only rent furnished places? If you have a big family how do you find a big enough place? Do kids practice their musical instruments at home, or does that bother the neighbors?
Most americans that tolerate them have never lived in a walkable city before, so they don't know that there is a better way.
Not sure I'm better for it.
But there are certainly green pastures elsewhere...
Silicon Valley in particular has been known for boring suburbs (with the rare except being SF with its $5000 rents), massive wealth disparities, and general lack of livability and inability to get around easily.
These are well documented issues of living in the bay. What's with the surprise? Do people not do research before uprooting?
Or maybe you caught them on a macrodose day
In bad traffic, this might be true if you're measuring from downtown PA to downtown MV. But that's because downtown PA is at the northern tip of PA (there's Cal Ave and Midtown further south, and much closer to MV) and downtown MV is toward the southern end of MV.
If you were to cherry-pick an alternative stat, you'd point out that downtown Palo Alto is just a 5 minute drive from downtown Menlo Park. There's also Caltrain, that takes 10 mins to get from MV to PA or PA to MP.
Feeling the SF Bay burnout, too?