Even East PA was the hood. Oakland was famous for riots
SF governance has always been terrible. Real estate has gotten so expensive that startups anxious to conserve runway are pushing deeper into bad neighborhoods that were once unthinkable
If the cost of office space were a concern, it'd be difficult to explain why they're anywhere near the Bay Area at all.
The nice thing about Bay Area is that everyone is on the "same page" (call it an echo chamber maybe)
You can go into any meeting and mention some technical thing like LangChain and everyone knows what u are talking about. No need to waste 15 minutes getting ppl up 2 speed. Outside the Bay Area, Europe etc. you'd mostly get blank stares, even in an accelerator or hub
The Facebook / Sun campus is there because it was cheap land