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Comment by danjac | Hacker News Reader

Maybe San Francisco is just not suitable any more? There's nothing magic about SF's geography that makes it a tech hub. It's not a mining town that needs to be next to coal or minerals, or a ski resort town that needs some mountains and snow. It's based on work that can literally be done anywhere.

Hollywood, after all, was just a dusty desert town that became the hub of the movie business because it was easier to move there and start a new one than dealing with Edison's lawyers back East, so maybe the tech industry needs to get out of SF, start a new hub somewhere else, and leave the city to the NIMBYs.

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> There's nothing magic about SF's geography

It includes two of the world's top ten universities, incredible natural beauty there and nearby, excellent weather (locals complain, as locals do, but it's wonderful), and all the resources and people are gathered there. It's hard to imagine the return on investment of moving.

It’s easy to imagine it moving. The people doing the work are the ICs (individual contributors), and up until recently, SF was the only place to go to have a top notch career in tech. People sacrificed to live in SF as junior to mid level engineers because eventually they would get to the point where they are a senior engineer and make enough to afford housing. But now the housing has gotten so expensive that even the senior ICs have difficulty justifying sticking around because they are on a treadmill that takes years to save enough for a down payment (as prices keep rising). You need like $400k saved to buy in SF and you’ll still end up with a $6000/mo mortgage. You have to be a couple. Enough have figured this is a raw deal and have fled to other places like Seattle and Austin. So many in fact that you can now have just as promising a career today as someone could only get in SF 10-20 years ago. Eventually SF will find it hard to attract new ICs to the area and you’ll end up with an aging cohort of mid level managers, directors and staff level engineers that have fewer and fewer people to manage.

Companies won’t keep increasing total comp for junior engineers in SF when they can grow their offices in other cheaper cities instead.

You need a robust pipeline of junior folks and SF is increasingly strangling that pipeline and other cheaper cities are as attractive as SF once was.

I can think about Stanford as the first one... the other one is probably Berkeley. I'm quite surprised they both are in world's top ten universities - actually, skeptical about that. "Incredible natural beauty" is not only at least somewhat subjective, but definitely is not exclusive to SF. Weather is good, but even Honolulu and Miami would argue, not to mention quite a few other places, even if they are minority overall - so the weather is not that unique.

People - yes, currently the state of the people is well tuned in favor of SF (SFBA). But the question still remains.

no need to be skeptical, it's just one search away: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/ra...

You may even ignore this particular ranking, but it really doesn't matter, because neither Honolulu nor Miami, with all due respect, have anything close to either school, let alone both (or half a dozen of UC's in driving distance)

Also, very subjective, but I can't bear the humidity in FL and HI for more than a week, so saying it's all similarly good weather in all those places doesn't make sense to me.

But really, it's a combination of all of these things in one place.

Combination is good, agree. For separate points, the argument stands.

And the combination is likely the product of people, gradually accumulated in the area. So, yes, the intellectual potential is great. But that could be moved some hundreds miles away relatively easily, or at least replicated to a high degree - partially because of the sad situation with housing.

It's also a place that is relatively welcoming to people from almost any part of the world. It's not perfect (no where is) but there a lot of places in the US where if you came from another continent or practiced an unusual religion you would feel more uncomfortable then you would in SF. That's a quality it has possessed for decades, for historical reasons.

> relatively welcoming to people from almost any part of the world.

The US has an __abundance__ of places that fit this description.

I'm trying to think of a major metropolitan area in The US which wouldn't fit this description.

Universities are institutions made of people. If SF becomes to expensive for those people to work and study in, they'll face the same problem of housing costs. And universities rise and fall over time: a great CS department one decade might slip down the ratings the next.

There are many places on Earth with nice weather and scenery (depending on taste). There are many cities with great night life for younger people, or good schools for families. None of these things are unique selling points intrinsically required for a tech hub. And if remote work becomes the norm (and yes I know all the arguments for and against) you can live in your dream town with the right mixture of scenery/weather/nightclubs/schools without paying the premium.

The one thing SF has is inertia : tech happens there because it happens there. But Detroit used to have inertia, too.

> universities rise and fall over time

I think it's the opposite; what changes more slowly? How has the list of elite universities changed over time, unless we are talking about centuries?

> There are many cities with great night life for younger people, or good schools for families.

People like to find others with their interests. Very smart, highly educated, intellectual, creative people gather in SF, NY, LA, Boston. It's all the people who were bored and felt limited elsewhere. You want talented people to work with, to talk to, to challenge you. All those people who wanted to get out of their small town go to these places.

“Hollywood, after all, was just a dusty desert town that became the hub of the movie business because it was easier to move there and start a new one than dealing with Edison's lawyers back East…”

Yes, but also no. Keep in mind the popularity of Westerns in the 1930’s-1950’s and the ease with which you can get to desert/mountain/beach/city/forest/etc settings within a relatively short drive from L.A.

That said, I generally agree with your point.

And sunshine. Sunshine helps when you're shooting outdoors. Southern California has more sunny days than the east.

And a bit of haze helps the aesthetic as well.

They add that in post.

After all, the Battle of the Bulge did take place in the California desert. Medieval England looks like California, too. Even the alien worlds of Star Trek look suspiciously like California.

Well, to a large extent, yes. You might want to look at:

https://brilliantmaps.com/california-filming-map/

Also, consistent sunny weather, because wasting shooting days due to inconsistent weather adds up to losing a lot of money.

And when production moved to Vancouver in the 90s, you had shows like the X-Files which often seemed to take place in a vague Pacific Northwest location.

This is a questionable take on two levels.

First, yes, yes there is something magic about SF's geography, it's the closest major city to the largest VC hub in the world. These companies thrive on young talent that prefers to live in a city. It's not dissimilar to the gold rush 170 years ago when you think about it.

Second, what do you mean "San Francisco is just not suitable any more"? The tech companies and their employees are the least impacted by rising housing costs. By and large they are doing alright, so what is their incentive to uproot everything and randomly go roll the dice somewhere else which would A) not have a critical mass of VC in their backyard and B) will offer no guarantee of not reacting exactly the same as SF.

Keep in mind, 20 years ago there was barely any tech in San Francisco proper. Sure there tech employees who chose to live there and suffer the commute to the peninsula, as is their prerogative being free individuals residing in the US. The reason tech moved in was because SF offered tax breaks—they wanted their piece of the tax revenue and daily spending from well-to-do tech workers. If the city really felt tech being there was the problem they have a lot of levers (eg. raise taxes, zoning changes, etc) to push it out. Of course they don't want to do that because it would cause far more economic harm than good. NIMBYs are of course willing to entertain the charade of successful tech companies as the scapegoat because it keeps their home values sky high while deflecting to the amorphous "tech companies", who in fact they have zero control over policy and at best marginal interest in addressing the issue at all.

it's the closest major city to the largest VC hub

San Jose has entered the room. San Francisco is cute and that's why people like it and ignore San Jose.

haha fair enough, closest cute major city : ) As a longtime South Bay resident, it's super-boring down here and actually many of the same problems, expensive and lots of homeless.

But all of that is beside the point. The real interesting question is whether the companies will yank the leash Musk-style and have everyone come back here, or not. There is a lot of hype in both directions, but I'd say that debate is not settled yet.

Palo Alto joins the room too.

All this talk of "just relax zoning and build housing" is so simplistic that it's actually kinda cute. As if everything else just multiplies accordingly-- streets widen, schools are built, water/power/etc just magically appear whenever residential units are simply permitted.

Both tech and VC are vastly more mobile than anything to do with the gold rush or even other 'technology' sectors with heavy physical assets, it's purely a coordination game.

I think having both in high concentrations is mutually beneficial. The same goes for tech workers: having thousands of potential employers within commute distance without having to move is great.

That's what I meant by coordination game: it could be any place, but they should all (well, sufficiently many) be in the same place. That's why there's a lot of staying power once a place has achieved that status (fyi, in game theory that's called a correlated equilibrium [0]).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlated_equilibrium

Just FYI, San Jose is bigger than San Francisco in terms of population and square miles.

That's not to say that SF might not be more of a major city than SJ, in fact I would say that personally I think it is in terms of culture and history and social impact, but it's at least debatable.

I think SJ vs SF distinction is not very material to this thread. The OG Silicon Valley of HP and Fairchild Semiconductor fame liked to build corporate campuses around Stanford on cheap (at the time) land. 90's Yahoo, Doubleclick, Google followed suit. In the late 2000's, a new wave of startups like Twitter figured they don't have to stick to corporate code and just move up to a more fun city up north, combined with some tax breaks from SF specifically. How does it matter? It's the same area (i drive up and down every day) with much the same problems.

Tech hubs grow organically from network effects. It's impossible to move the whole network in one go.

Best you can do is make one network gradually shrink and another one gradually grow somewhere else.

Counterpoint: Shenzhen

Can we just move them to the US in one go? Asking for a friend.

Hollywood also had more days of great weather than anywhere else and this was especially important for maintaining production schedules.

> Maybe San Francisco is just not suitable any more?

Good to keep in mind that San Francisco never was part of Silicon Valley, until this past decade where the mindshare of being SV migrated north to include SF.

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