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Comment by npilk | Hacker News Reader

5 years ago, I would have loved to move to the Bay Area, despite the expense. Today, I'm looking for a new city and the Bay isn't really even in my consideration set.

I will say that as an outsider, the Bay and San Francisco often seem to get conflated when people discuss them. I've heard plenty about the issues the city of SF is facing right now, but my sense is that many parts of the Bay are still thriving - just prohibitively expensive for most. Is that true? Or is the lived experience in other parts of the Bay also getting worse?

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Moved here 6 months ago. Lot of what you read is hyperbole. Truth is always somewhere in the middle. Bay Area can be amazing or horrible depending on where you live, where you work and how much you earn. There are some areas where I don't want to go but there are a lot more areas that are thriving, full of friendly people with great communities.

Yes, it is expensive - that is very true. Yes, taxes are high. But despite those, there is no lack of people moving here so there must be something right, right?

I have lived in 6 states in the US and 5 countries globally including most that people throw out as alternatives to the Bay Area. In my experience, Bay Area has the highest concentration of smartest and open minded people that I have come across. You want to build something? Bay Area energizes you because everyone will be encouraging and ready to help. Weather is nice. There are plenty of gorgeous places to visit, within the area and even more with a short drive.

However, I'll repeat - it is expensive! This is the most expensive place I have lived. We are a dual income household and money is less important than it used to be so for us it is totally worth it. Some years ago, we probably couldn't afford to live here.

There are two kinds of people I am seeing moving to the Bay Area - 1) high earners that can afford it and 2) those early in their careers who don't mind living in a less than optimal situation and moving here gives them a wage bump .

By large, the people moving away are those with average to good incomes who have kids and can't afford the lifestyle that they want. In the end, it comes down to what you value more. In the Bay Area, one thing you do NOT get is value for money. Will we be here long term? Who know but right now, I am in love with this place.

I'd also add that much of what drives Silicon Valley tech to a significant degree is the highly educated first immigrant and the support system and retail infrastructure that this requires (i.e. familiar restaurants, grocery stores, cultural events, language schools/tutoring).

So I would say most folks saying the center tech will just move to Texas are discounting the needs for first generation immigrants to travel home to Asia Pacific as well as have a local support network.

It's trivially easy for Keith Rabois, Jason Calacanis or Peter Thiel to move to Miami or Elon Musk to Austin. It's another thing for Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Jensen Huang to move to Miami/Austin and feel more at home versus just staying put.

I use this as a barometer of first generation immigrant tech friendliness.

Also its not that it wouldn't be great if all places had built in support for first generation tech immigrants - its just not the current reality.

https://www.99ranch.com/my-store/store-locator

How exactly are you using this website to judge first generation immigrant support?

99 Ranch Market is a chain of supermarkets catering to the Asian community, and it's pretty easy to shop there if you don't speak English.

They tend to build in places with large immigrant communities, so having a 99 Ranch Market could be seen as a sign of diversity.

That being said I personally tend to shop at smaller Asian stores which don't have websites or multiple locations. Just because the store doesn't have a website doesn't mean there isn't an strong immigrant community in that area.

True - 99Ranch is a first order filter. Another first order filter is Din Tai Fung locations: https://www.dintaifungusa.com/us/locations.html

A more time intensive but perhaps more useful/fair measure is Yelp 3.5+ star ratings designated at $$$ with more than 100 reviews for things like Indian chaat, Cantonese dimsum, Taiwanese boba, Korean BBQ, Japanese Izakaya etc.

I agree with most of your comment, but I do think you're discounting the ability for those hubs to exist elsewhere a bit. Dallas, Houston and surprisingly Atlanta all have really robust areas where you can see and feel the cultural influence of immigrants that live in the area.

It extends to the buildings that are built, shops that are run and overall feeling of the neighborhoods.

They're not all in the city for sure, and none of them are as big or as connected as areas you would find in say Orange County but still quite strong and really add to the cities themselves.

Yes totally didn't mean to discount it. It is getting quite diverse and growing more so everyday - which is a good thing.

I'd only point out - for a first generation immigrant with a tech salary and tech stock options - all things being equal - I'd imagine the vast preference would be to go where there are 99ranches and Din Tai Fungs and high end chaat at a density where its in proximity to high end housing versus being in the traditional "ethnic" end of town.

It will change for sure as tech slowly disperses - so it should be fun to watch.

Oakland still has crime issues but it has really rejuvenated in the last 10 years. The census data reflects this (we grew by 10%) but it is also getting much better in terms of amenities, restaurants and nightlife. For the first time I can remember I see younger people (mid 20s) out and about in the evening rather than trekking over the bridge to SF. It seems to have become the epicenter of dining innovation in the East Bay (taking that title from Berkeley) and is some ways competitive with SF now in terms of new restaurants. The San Francisco Chronicle reviews a large number of Oakland restaurants now (which I suspect is mostly due to the fact that their new restaurant critic likely can't afford to live in SF and lives in Oakland). Many neighborhood corridors are finally "happening" after previous false starts (the Laurel District being the most recent example).

I just moved to Oakland (Lakeside area) from Tennessee, and it was purely voluntary. My job is remote-first, but the office is in SF. I'd been working remotely for the last 4 years in TN, and I was sick of it. Now I'm really enjoying life in Oakland and the Bay Area. Locals keep telling me it's a shell of what it was pre-pandemic, but the pandemic is (hopefully) a temporary state. It will be interesting to see where things go when everything normalizes again.

Also, the weather in Oakland is actually suitable for outdoor dining.

For all intents and purposes the Bay has two parts. The places tourists visit and news org talk about (almost exclusively downtown SF and SOMA), and the places people actually live - like the sunset, mission, san jose, east bay, and the peninsula.

Most analysis does not go beyond the first part.

I'm not saying the second part is a utopia by any means, but you can carve out a more affordable and generally normal and happy life in the latter part pretty easily.

All said the traffic sucks (like all large metros), its still very expensive (particularly for families who can't live with roomates), childcare costs are high, etc.

I understand what you're trying to say, but I find it disturbing to suggest that "people don't actually live in downtown SF and SOMA". Many people, especially many lower income folks, do actually live there. The compartmentalization mentality is real, and highly problematic. (I'll give you the benefit of the doubt though and assume you were just relaying this widespread sentiment, and not yourself supporting it.)

Thats an important distinction and you're right that my goal was not to marginalize those regions in any way.

My framing was in giving context to housed individuals considering moving into the Bay Area, and to highlight that the Bay Area is incredibly diverse and that there is room if you look outside the more "mainstream" areas.

If you have the money, it's still a great place to live. While it does have its problems, a lot of it is right-wing propaganda. I've thought about leaving, but the one thing that keeps me in the Bay Area is the sheer density of smart people. You are surrounded by ambition. I have yet to find another city in the US that has the same energy.

Plenty of smart people all over:

New York, Boston, Pasadena, South Loop Chicago, Austin, Seattle, Northern Virginia, etc.

I've lived in many of those areas. I agree, plenty of smart people, but not the same density compared to the Bay Area.

> I will say that as an outsider, the Bay and San Francisco often seem to get conflated when people discuss them. I've heard plenty about the issues the city of SF is facing right now, but my sense is that many parts of the Bay are still thriving - just prohibitively expensive for most. Is that true? Or is the lived experience in other parts of the Bay also getting worse?

That's very, very true, and also one of my pet peeves as an insider.

Most of the problems that people are associating with the Bay Area - the rampant crime, poop on the streets, poor schools, dysfunctional politics, performative wokeness - are specifically San Francisco problems (and to a slightly lesser degree, Oakland and downtown San Jose). In my neighborhood, there are yard signs out saying "We [heart] our police", right alongside BLM signs and rainbow flags. There is no poop on the streets, not even dog poop (there are occasional broken bottles, but they're as likely to be Snapple as beer). The two times I've had to call them (for identity theft and a medical emergency), they were there within an hour and 3 minutes, respectively, and they were courteous and professional. I feel safe walking my kid back from preschool.

Mid-peninsula, Redwood City, Mountain View, most of Sunnyvale, Fremont, North San Jose, Berkeley/El Cerrito, are all on the upswing. Housing prices are unfortunately all going up to match, but that's because people want to live there.

I've heard that the center of gravity of Silicon Valley shifts every 5-10 years or so, each time a new tech wave happens. It was SF in the 2010s (mobile & sharing economy), Palo Alto & Mountain View in the 00s (Web 2.0 & social networking), SF in the late 90s (dot-com boom), Mountain View in the early 90s (SGI & Netscape), Cupertino in the late 80s (Apple, Seagate, and Borland), Scotts Valley in the early 80s (Borland), spread over the peninsula in the 70s (Oracle in Redwood Shores, Intel in Santa Clara), and Sunnyvale in the 1960s (Lockheed Martin, Hendy Ironworks). It's likely we're seeing another turn now, and my bets for a new center of gravity would be Redwood City (crypto, drones) or Foster City / Redwood Shores (biotech).

SF has always been a far worse place to live and work unless you are young and like nightlife and restaurants and lots of socializing outside of the office. Yes, SF has gotten worse because too many petty crimes have been de-criminalized which has lead to the rational decision of bad actors to commit many petty crimes.

Outside of SF, life goes on as it always has. The major crime issues are (a) catalytic converter theft which costs the victim thousands and (b) car window breaks to grab any visible bags because too many techs leave their laptops in a visible bag.

Housing prices have always been rising, traffic is always getting worse. It's annoying, but not new. Companies have always been leaving and new places are always touted as the new "Silicon XYZ." The Silicon Glen. The Silicon Prairie. Silicon Forest.

I'm old. All this has happened before. All this will happen again.

> SF has always been a far worse place to live and work unless you are young and like nightlife and restaurants and lots of socializing outside of the office.

You can replace "SF" with any developed city and you make the same point. It sounds like you're more against urban living in general than SF specifically.

The details and tradeoffs vary by city but I think I generally agree. You tend to have at least many of the same tradeoffs in many major cities and the tradeoffs are such that cons tend to become weightier with age and the pros less compelling.

On the contrary, I find older people who live in cities to be much more engaged in life (and interesting as a result) than older folk who moved out to a suburb or rural area. When you're older in the city, you can walk or take public transport to interesting cultural events, have more frequent conversations with neighbors, and continue to have unique daily stimulus in your life. And as you get older, not being dependent on a car is a huge deal.

Without unique events taking place, people more often than not settle into a set routine that causes them to recede mentally at a much faster rate.

It really depends on what sorts of activities you like. I know a lot of non-urban older folks who are extremely active with hiking, paddling, etc.

And "dependent on car" varies. If you can easily walk distances and take public transit, not being dependent on a car can be a plus. But if you can safely drive but aren't very mobile otherwise, using a car can be more liberating.

Very true - I think the common ground here though is as people get older, they need to stay engaged in something on a regular basis outside of their home.

I'm from the Bay Area and have lived in Oakland for the last 6 years (lived in SF for 11) and from my perspective it's great here. Not without it's problems and very expensive compared to other cities. The only other places I've ever lived were north TX, MT, and central CA, but I've extensively traveled the US for work and holidays.

My entire career (since 2005) has been in tech and mostly at startups. The bay area is done has been a trope my entire life. What I've noticed in my adult life and as a professional is that people move here regularly, but there is also a bit of a hype cycle that draws and repels people. I also see a whole lot of people that come here to get rich and get jaded pretty fast when they don't while having to pay a whole bunch more than if they lived elsewhere. I have a great group of friends that are mostly from other places around the world and I think some of them are here to stay, but inevitably some will leave. I don't think this is specific to the bay though.

SF can be a really delightful city but it comes with the well publicized problems associated with a large homeless problem and a lot of petty crime. Especially away from the Moscone/SOMA/Tenderloin, it's probably not as bad as its reputation but it isn't great.

Aside from housing prices, the issue with most of the South Bay is that a lot of it is pretty boring suburban sprawl with a few cute little downtowns. But I don't love the area in general until I get into the Santa Cruz mountains.

> I will say that as an outsider, the Bay and San Francisco often seem to get conflated when people discuss them.

Yes, from an outside perspective SF and South Bay (clasically Silicon Valley proper, though in the last decade many companies have settled in SF) are mingled together. I know I used to say "SF" when I meant the Bay Area, before I lived here.

But SF is about an hour north (or way more if traffic is bad) from the classic Silicon Valley. And a very different place with its own unique problems. I go to SF once a year or less and it always feels like an alien place.

The rest of the Bay Area is still mostly pretty great, if you can somehow deal with the expense.

Source: Just my observations, closing in on 25 years living in Silicon Valley.

One thing about San Francisco is exactly the same thing as any other city. It has problems, usually localized to a few neighborhoods, with bad city services, crime, and homelessness. The thing about San Francisco that is different is a whole lot of people bid up the price of housing even in the crappy neighborhoods, hoping to ride the wave of gentrification, only to find out you can't gentrify the entire city because the poor and the homeless don't just evaporate by sheer force of will. Now they're left in still crappy neighborhoods, but with homes they paid 7 figures for, or 3k a month a rent in places they don't even own.

Buuuut, crime actually is abnormally high there.

If you just look at crime trends, violent crime in San Francisco has trended downward pretty consistently for decades, but slower than nationally and across California. Property crime has actually gone up, which is the most atypical thing, because it's gone down most everywhere else. San Francisco is the fourth biggest city in California. So what about the fourth biggest in Florida? Orlando has seen both property and violent crime rates drop quite a bit, but they were absurdly high for some odd reason 20 years ago. They're still higher than San Francisco on violent crime, but lower on property crime. Fourth biggest city in Texas is Austin, which is quite a bit lower than both Orlando and San Francisco on both property and violent crime, close to Texas and national averages. New York only really has one city, and it's a little bit lower on violent crime, and drastically lower on property crime.

So all in all, it seems like San Francisco has an abnormally high property crime rate. People seem to love pinning this on Prop 47, but property crime rates have actually always been abnormally high in San Francisco. It's worth noting Prop 47 is statewide, yet property crime rates double the state average is just a San Francisco thing. Los Angeles is almost the same as the statewide average.

So whatever the heck is actually the problem, it's specifically a San Francisco thing. Unfortunately, since I don't think it really fits standard red/blue culture war narratives, no one is incentivized to figure out the real reason and do anything about it.

Something interesting is to compare to other places that were the site of some type of "gold rush" that is the reason the city even exists. South Africa and Congo have been in terrible shape forever, at one point murder and kidnapping capitals of the world. Even the Yukon Territory in Canada has among the highest crime rates in the country, in spite of being largely rural.

Way before anyone ever wrote Twitter take downs of tech bro gentrifiers, California's first millionaire, Samuel Brannan, was the richest man from the gold rush, but he never even found gold. He just bought up all the retail space and sold shovels, pick axes, and pans at a ridiculous markup. When his speculation drove up the price of land, it led to something called squatter's riots when people being made homeless got pissed, and he formed an extra-legal "vigilance committee" to be a sort of private police force that rounded up and hanged people before California became a real state and has actual laws.

I'm not sure there's a real point there, except to speculate about the possibility of some sort of centuries spanning cultural inertia that forces a place to maintain the same character it was founded with long after there is still any good reason for it.

"So whatever the heck is actually the problem, it's specifically a San Francisco thing. Unfortunately, since I don't think it really fits standard red/blue culture war narratives, no one is incentivized to figure out the real reason and do anything about it."

One of my wife's classmates wrote a B-school paper on this (having a certain intimate acquaintance with it). It's corruption and dysfunction between the SFPD and the DA's office. The two organizations have a uniquely antagonistic relationship, such that the SFPD actively does poorly at their job to spite the DA's office, and then the DA's office actively refuses to charge to spite the SFPD.

Uncertain what the set of incentives is that led to this, but I suspect it may have something to do with the DA being an elected official and hence responsible to the people of SF (who are fairly wary of the SFPD because of past history), while the SFPD are career civil servants who want to avoid taking any action that could endanger their life or job but aren't ultimately responsible to voters.

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