Where are the kids? Where are the women? After working in SV for a while, I realized normal people don't live there. Like, the girls in your high school class. They are not there. The place seems fake. Like an airport.

There are some normal people passing through, until they realize it is not worth the grind working at In'n'Out burger to just almost pay rent.

But then you got these legacy normal people, that have been there for so long, that they can be around anyways. They stand out and feels like museum pieces.

It's a tale of two cities type situation. I lived there for 6 years from 84 to 90. Met my wife who was born and raised there. One of her sisters married a mechanical engineer who did ventilation/plumbing for semi fabs. They bought a Townhouse in the heart of Cuptertino for ~$175K in 86. She was a real estate agent. They divorced a few years ago and I heard they sold it for $1.6M. Her other sister worked temp jobs for years and had some writing and sound board gigs. She was house sitting but essentially homeless in San Jose when she died of a stroke a few years back age 53.

We left for Oregon in 1990 because the price of houses then (about $250K) just seemed precariously high and we didn't want to live the kind of lifestyle that was required to pay that kind of mortgage.

The same has been said of New York City, and is true to some extent. If you don't have a lot of money, it's not a very comfortable place to live.