Silicon Valley Is Stuck In An Uncanny Valley Of Density | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley Is Stuck In An Uncanny Valley Of Density

forbes.com

53 pointsfriism55 comments

The question to ask, is not whether we can become as dense as Manhattan or Brooklyn, bur rather, do we want to be more like our Northeastern counterparts?

In the 70's, most of what is now called "Silicon Valley" was farmland. All those shopping centers and apartments named after man-made formations of fruit trees are because, well, there used to be a lot of those trees there a few decades ago.

In four short decades, we have developed the land to the point where, as others here have mentioned, "no more open land" to be easily developed. We are now faced with a choice: do we develop further? If so, to what end, and for whom? What are the costs?

But first we must consider, who is the "we" in my queries above? Whose interests should be considered? The long time residents of the Valley? The young, vibrant, restless newcomers?

Understandably and naturally, there is friction. There is tension. The old timers already have what they need: a comfortable single family home with a family to fill its corridors. Why would they or should they allow others to disturb their peace and comfort that they worked so hard for? They fight to protect the space and luxury they feel entitled to, and arguably are.

The newcomers find it increasingly difficult to not only find such an abode, but to find even a reasonably priced rental until located within a reasonable distance from their offices. Understandably and naturally, they pine for amenities that are well within reach for others their age in other parts of the country. They rightfully feel that they are entitled to what they need: reasonable living arrangements.

Both sides have legitimate arguments. Silicon Valley is a beautiful place, and it would be a shame to turn it into a concrete jungle. But on the other hand, there is an undeniable generation inequality with respect to real estate: real estate prices in Palo Alto only declined by about 15% during the worst times of the financial crisis, and have most likely reached new heights by now. Every year, it becomes more difficult to find affordable housing, particularly near the mega-employers like Google. The year over year increase in rent in Mountain View is in excess of 10%. Only the privileged amongst the youth can afford the slim pickings that are available, as the rent is enough to crush the savings of more modestly salaried engineers.

Who is right? It is more of a generation divide than a class divide. I sympathize and empathize with both sides, being both a young, modestly compensated professional in the tech sector, and also the son of immigrants to Silicon Valley who sacrificed a monstrous portion of their lives to attain the little that they have to show for it. Whichever way the ball rolls, I'm in line for both pain and pleasure.

"We", both the old and the young, are both right to lay claim to what we believe should be rightfully ours. Such a situation does not have a simple, elegant solution. But we can at least start by acknowledging to each other that yes, you are completely justified to want what you want.

> It would be a shame to turn it into a concrete jungle

Hi! I've lived in several coastal and Midwestern cities, and travelled many of the others. I have been to a number of foreign cities on three continents. I was stunned at how underdeveloped Silicon Valley is. Concrete jungles are awesome! They sound scary until you realize the modern alternative is the far more common concrete wastelands of suburbia: isolating, sterile, cultureless come to mind. Tokyo, Manhatten, downtown SF: they are the most human, inspiring places on earth.

> We ... are both right

Here's what kills me about arguments like this: they're conversation killers. The argument deserves to be had. Instead, you're playing the general good will against itself for some karma points. To hell karma points! Fight for what you believe in! Anything less is a vote for the status quo.

I've moved 17 times. I believe in the concrete jungle.

Home prices in the bay area have skyrocketed 10 to 15 times beyond the rate of inflation over the past 30 years. This has pushed the renters who used to live there further and further out, or forced their standard of living ever further downward.

I disagree with the idea that existing homeowners have some right prevent developers from building tall housing nearby on PRIVATE property. You own your land, I own mine, and as long as I'm not doing anything toxic, your rights do not extend into my space. These anti-development policies force people to live far away from their workplace, turning most of the bay area into a massive wasteland of highways and parking lots.

A few incredibly lucky and selfish people can deny the right of the many to have the dignity of affordable housing, but it is not just. It is shameful.

As an aside, despite artificially enforced low-density, Berkeley and Palo Alto have depressingly few vibrant public spaces. Sure there's trees along the street, but most of the parks are just little tiny bits of grass and a few scraggly trees sandwiched between two or three active roads. You'd think low density might include huge open parks, but no, it is mostly just big houses with private yards and lots of parking lots to deal with how far apart everything is.

Contrast: In Tokyo, since there is almost nothing preventing you from doing whatever you like with your own land, there is a wide mix of different housing to choose from, at all different price-points. I can afford to live smack in the middle of everything, near the biggest park and shopping area, also a few minutes walk from a major train station. I also have a spectacular view that goes all the way to the horizon for about 160 degress.

What?

No they are not conversation killers. I used to think they were conversation killers till I realized that all it meant is that I now actually have to think harder and respond at a higher level.

His last line is important: We agree that its a complex problem.

So at least now we can start identifying multiple solutions which can help this.

One of them, and important - is pointing out that Concrete jungles DON't have to be bad places to live.

A good follow up would be examples of cities that do manage a good balance between high density places, good mass transit, and managing places which keep a good balance of greenery.

Places which can be redeveloped would be another option of something to discuss.

what/how good are the mass transit options in SV (I don't live there), what are the long term city plans? Do they need to be updated?

Is there enough cash to follow through on the original plans? The updates? What are the time horizons for those things?

All those questions can be worked on better, if people are no longer spending time fighting between themselves, and working together on getting a common solution everyone can be happier with.

Sorry, but "Tokyo... one of the most human, inspiring place on earth". Living in Tokyo is not fun. There are way too many people. You barely have space to walk, and the trains are overcrowded. It's very noisy, and if you want to go out of the city you need to take a 2 hours ride to start seeing actual green stuff.

To my mind, inspiration comes from flexibility, i.e. when you can choose to change environment as you please. A mid-size city is ideal for that, since you can have times in the city and off the city, that change your perspective. If you live in Tokyo, you just cannot do that, and you are stuck in a world that is very different from everywhere else, and out of touch with a lot of what most people consider "reality".

Disclaimer: I live in Japan.

Tokyo is very much not my cup of tea, but for people who enjoy city life because it is city life and not because of non-city things they can find in the city, Tokyo can be a very nice place to be. Is it crazily overcrowded? Yes. Is it overly expensive? Yes. Is it possible to experience alienation from humanity to a level almost incomprehensible anywhere else in the world while simultaneously having no elbow room? Yes.

You can also live in a shoebox apartment in a walkable neighborhood with forty-seven little restaurants at which the owner will remember your face after your third visit, well-maintained parks and orderly, efficient public services, connected via the world's hands-down-best mass transit system to a) a commercial center which has just about anything anyone could possibly want to buy (and that is not always a compliment) and b) a stupidly convenient rail network which will whisk you to anywhere on Honshu, including the parts of Japan that I rather enjoy, in less time than it takes many Americans to get to work in the morning.

If New York has any appeal to you, Tokyo will probably be your kind of town. If it doesn't, Tokyo will probably not be.

The a) and b) do not only apply to Tokyo. The top 10 cities in Japan can offer the same degree of convenience, less the "alienation from humanity to a level almost incomprehensible anywhere else in the world", which I find a very good description of the situation, by the way.

Concerning the "well maintained parks", several parts of Tokyo feel/look dirtier than many other places in the country, except maybe the southern part of Osaka.

If you live in a commuter suburb of Tokyo and ride the train at rush hour, yes you will not be happy. But why commute? I live 8 minutes' walk from Shibuya station and during the day perhaps 1 or two people walk by every few minutes. At night even fewer. Cars drive so slowly on my side-street that you cannot hear them at all.

As for taking two hours to "actual green stuff" man are you ever exaggerating. Even without LEAVING the city I know of 3 different nature preserves that range from 20 to 30 minutes away DOOR TO DOOR. If you hop on a train for 30 minutes, you hit Tamagawa, a breathtaking open expanse of river and low brush. Want forest? How about Takao-san, a breathtaking natural space with tons of hiking trails and a mountain you can climb easily in an afternoon. 44 minutes west of Shinjuku.

If you hate crowds, just avoid them. "Living in Tokyo is not fun" says more about your unhappiness with the rhythm of life you have created for yourself than it says about the city.

Well, the point is, to get to a green space, you need to get in a crowd in the first place. You cannot avoid them that easily. It's like you get double-punishment before the reward.

Tokyo is simply a city that is OVER-capacity, not by a factor of 1 or 2, but 10 or maybe more. If the train is 10 minutes late for any reason, any station would be filled with people on the platforms you can cross through it anymore. That says a lot. I feel New York is way more livable, from what I can compare.

Its funny you mention the train being late, and crowds. When I lived in NYC, traveling on the train during non-peak times was so stressful I avoided it like the plague. Always late. Noisy as hell. Smells like a cesspool. During rush-hour the train might stop in the middle of a tunnel, and the lights go out, the whole time it is not even air conditioned. I visited NYC 2 months ago after a few years away, and the floating filth in the tracks was still there of course. My Japanese travel companion who had never been in NYC before took only two train rides (at non-peak hours) to declare a strong negative impression of the NYC subway.

Maybe you live in another NYC where there are no trains? Or you just drive everywhere, but you don't mind that it takes an hour stuck in traffic to get out of Manhattan on a friday evening. In Tokyo it takes about the same amount of time to travel any distance whether it is 9am or 3pm, since the trains actually work.

I beg to differ. I live in Tokyo. I think it feels great and fun. It's New York, but nice. There are open spaces to the north/south/east/west, within 30 min (depending on which side you live).

Well I have lived in different parts of Japan and I find Tokyo the least inspiring place to be in this country. There's no great landmarks (except if you consider a 600m concrete/steel tower a valuable landmark...), no cool historical places, and this is not a place where I can relax, ever. Even when you reach home you have to live in the smallest apartment ever because it's what's available and affordable there. I agree Tokyo has some interesting aspects (how some quarters differ from one another), but there are too many drawbacks for me to qualify this as "inspiring". I guess it depends on your personality in the end, and what you can relate too. I need to be in a place when I can breathe, and Tokyo feels suffocating in many ways.

Tokyo is a big place. Living in Ebisu is worlds apart from living in Itabashi for example, but you'll need a bank balance to match.

Would you believe that the Bay Area is one of the most desirable places to live on the planet?

Nobody is going to take their homes away from single-family homeowners on the Peninsula.

The proposal is to upgrade zoning around El Camino, the 101, office parks, and downtowns to allow willing sellers to make even bigger gains by selling to higher density developers. Those developers would be allowed to put up Pacific Heights style tasteful, quality higher density (nothing Manhattan-like).

Or that's the fantasy proposal. I don't think there are any real proposals to make Peninsula development rational or useful to the people who live there. The local politics is content to choke on its overpriced and aging stagnation until some foreign center captures the magic of Silicon Valley.

Rather than filling in the land between 101 and 280, which would turn into LA-esque traffic nightmares, why not expand into the East Bay or farther south of San Jose?

There are housing development underway between south San Jose and Gilroy, but unfortunately, the jobs are not located there. While that may remove some pain off of the real-estate market further North, opening more development south of San Jose won't do much good if all the jobs stay in the Palo Alto / Mountain View/ Sunnyvale/ Santa Clara region.

That's true. I guess I see the "jobs area" expanding. I'm thinking at some point, companies will pitch it as a job perk alongside the arcade machines and catered meals--"our office is located in south San Jose where your rent will be two thirds of what it would be in Palo Alto!" Not to mention the office rent would be lower. I guess this all depends on what exactly attracts the company to Silicon Valley and how much that attraction is degraded by being on the fringes of the Valley.

There are objective ways to measure these things. New York City is the most efficient place in the whole country, with half the per capita energy consumption as the national average. Energy isn't free, and pollution isn't free, and those both argue very strenuously for favoring efficiency over soft fuzzy factors like the ones you mention.

Every year, it becomes more difficult to find affordable housing, particularly near the mega-employers like Google. The year over year increase in rent in Mountain View is in excess of 10%. Only the privileged amongst the youth can afford the slim pickings that are available, as the rent is enough to crush the savings of more modestly salaried engineers.

One thing that NYC has going for it that SV could benefit from: more stabilized rent control. No, not all of NYC is under rent control and not all of Silicon Valley needs to be subject to rent control, but it is probably one of the only things that will allow SV to continue to be a hub for new startups.

Burn rate. Even the best startup ideas will die when the biggest portion of their seed funding is going toward the trash can of residential rent. I've been here since 2006, and cannot forsee any more air getting pumped into the tires, so to speak.

I don't know how popular this idea might be, but part of me wonders if Silicon Valley should be just a breeding ground for new companies. Mature companies (eBay, for example) don't belong here. There could be some incentive for them to move to other more needy parts of the country where people are struggling. Office space and salaries would be cheaper, cities would be all over giving huge tax breaks to them. From a shareholder perspective, I'd want the management of a company I hold stock in to minimize expenses (presuming they were returning to me my due share of the savings via dividends).

I guess the problem is that successful companies get established and in a comfort zone and stop living "lean".

Rent control does NOT help new migrants to an area, or the young in general. Those are the people most likely to start new tech companies, or to go to work for rapidly growing companies.

Affordable rent does help both of those groups. That's distinct from rent control.

Actually, most big tech companies set up offices outside Silicon Valley for back office functions (where cheap labor is important -- like the phone call centers and CSRs in India and Omaha), and just to recruit engineers (SV has more engineers but also more competition for them; Ann Arbor has fewer, but fewer local companies). The only organizations which need to only be in one location, and need to be in silicon valley, are early/mid stage tech startups.

Affordable rent is a relative concept. What's affordable to Silicon Valley software engineers is not affordable to the people who clean the bathrooms in the corporate offices that employ those engineers, or who work at Subway, or who provide them with their morning mocha.

True life example: I live in East Palo Alto (EPA), and have lived there a little over a year. After my landlord in [city near EPA] started raising my rent by $100 every other month circa 2008 - 2009, I could not afford to live there any more. I moved to the least expensive place I could find, which was a garage on California St. in Mountain View that someone had converted to a rent dwelling. After moving in, I discovered that it was literally infested with black widow spiders and other creepy crawlies -- nightmarish. I couldn't live there.

I drifted for a bit, and eventually ended up renting a room in a shared apartment, from a lady with a condo and a mortgage in Mountain View. After a short while, she figured out with just a little bit more money from me, she wouldn't have to work full time, and therefore decided it was me who should be paying the bulk of her mortgage. So she raised my rent little by little, and when I protested because I didn't have the cash (I was working at a coffee shop at the time), she said "Why don't you just get another job at Carl's Jr?".

Most landlords have a similar attitude: modern day slavery.

When our room rental price negotiations fell apart, she called the police who literally escorted me onto the street. Thank goodness for the kindness of a few HackerDojo people, or I would have had to go to a homeless shelter. Mind you, this all happened while I was employed, working as many hours as they'd give me, in the city where I lived. I don't see any basis for the argument that I should've moved where it would be "cheaper" to live. (I walked to work at the coffee shop because I had no vehicle at the time).

Cuban's education explosion article yesterday hit home -- yes, a fully competent person with a master's degree -- working at a coffee shop for just a smidgen more than minimum wage.

In early 2011 I moved to EPA, which does have rent control. A studio apartment was all I needed, and got into it for less than I'd been paying for the spider-infested garage in Mountain View circa 2009. The price was just a tiny bit more than I had been paying for the shared apartment in Mountain View and the studio was 10X nicer (and private).

At the end of 2011, I got a bunch of mail / notices that the company which had a monopoly on all the apartments in EPA had been bought out by a _bigger_, more ferocious anti rent-control monster known as Residential Equity. And the first thing they did was raise my rent by as much as they possibly could. Lucky me, the rent control laws in EPA mean that they can't raise my rent by as much as they want, (which I am sure they would LOVE to do with Facebook moving next door) as a means to kick me out and make room for the Facebookers with bulging bank accounts.

Without the rent control law, there would be nothing stopping the same thing that happened to me in [city near EPA] from happening all over again. Or to my friendly (albeit not the best at English) neighbors who tend to be employed in the hospitality and service industries.

With the takeover, my rent did go up by more than I'd like, but it didn't go up by more than I could afford.

So that, my friend, is the definition of "affordable" rent. It's not as distinct from rent control as people would like to think.

What's affordable to Silicon Valley software engineers is not affordable to the people who clean the bathrooms...work at Subway...morning mocha.

The time of those people is far less valuable than the time of the engineers. If someone needs to waste an hour commuting, it's much better for it to be the barista than the engineer.

It's certainly good for you that you get to occupy this apartment and prevent facebookers from moving in, but how does anyone else benefit? Is the coffee you produce somehow more valuable to society than a new facebook feature?

> Is the coffee you produce somehow more valuable to society than a new facebook feature?

This is a slippery slope. Value is abstract. Some people may value the coffee more than facebook having 99.99% uptime. Furthermore, some people may value the diversity that having the barista neighboor. Etcetera.

To me rent control seems to be a symptom of much deeper urban planning issues.

Have you considered getting a better paying job? You seem intelligent, can write well, etc. (although the problems with rent control laws are widely known by economists, so I probably wouldn't hire you as an economics professor).

Even a "non technical" role (office manager, etc.) at a startup or mature tech company probably pays better than working at a coffee shop, unless you are really attracted to working in a coffee shop.

I'd assume there is a reason you don't do this, but maybe it's either outdated or irrational.

Rent control dramatically increases the price of housing and reduces the quality of housing. Rent control is basically just an inter-generational transfer of wealth. People who have cheap, rent-controlled housing (usually older people who became tenants long ago) are subsidized by new renters who cannot get the limited supply and rent-controlled housing, but pay higher housing prices as a result of supply constraints.

Where is the evidence for a 10% YOY increase?

http://patrick.net/housing/trends.php?uaddr=mountain+view%2C...

Too late. Single-family homeowners now control the zoning boards in Silicon Valley, and they're generally opposed to building new apartments or mass transit. New infrastructure is far too expensive these days anyway.

I suspect this is one factor behind the resurgence of New York on the startup scene.

How can new infrastructure be far too expensive for what is still the richest country on the planet?

Europe is building high speed rail links across the continent, even during a recession that is combined with slash and burn public sector policies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe

The problem is that costs for building the same transit infrastructure in America are ten or even fifty times higher than in Europe or Japan.

Part of the difference is inefficient procurement policies letting contracts to very high cost bidders with corrupt hand tailored RFQs and hiring expensive labor from well-connected limited pools. Part of it is active local democracy of communities that have been trained by the freeway boom to see infrastructure as a disaster for places that get it. Part of it is a very slow environmental review bureaucracy. Part of it is buy-American policies even when none of the top countries in some industries are American.

But the main problem is that transit is built and run in America as a way to spread political influence for committees that distribute pork and a fun indulgence for influential people who won't ride it. In Europe and Japan, middle class voters expect transit to work and the politicians and bureaucrats who build it intend to ride it themselves.

BART to SFO cost almost $2 billion. A good connection to CalTrain would have cost under $200 million. Heck, for under $1 billion you could also have connected CalTrain and BART at Embarcadero or Montgomery with a lower total trip time for most passengers.

I don't know what BART to San Jose will cost, but you could have really high quality BRT down El Camino with similar benefits in just a year with the money BART will spend on engineering studies over the next three decades planning the San Jose train.

But the authorities enjoy being involved in a big splash white elephant project more than building good transit.

A very good and short brief: http://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-ra...

More: http://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/cost-... http://www.forbes.com/sites/stephensmith/2011/12/07/washingt...

The problem with caltrain is frequency of service. It should extend out until an hour after bar closings and have minimum every 20 minute service. Otherwise it become unworkable for most people.

As a resident, seconded. Even living in San Francisco, the utility of a Caltrain connection is much reduced vs. BART. Was 10x too much to pay, if it is as the OP claimed? Maybe. As a former resident (and having grown up in) the east bay, the same applies: the Bart connection is much preferred to Caltrain, which is a big plus because the snarl of getting from the north-east bay to the airport is considerably worse vs. people taking their cars from the south bay, having also lived there as well.

I have also commuted on Caltrain, and liked it, but it's in weird places farther north, not well integrated with BART, and not frequent enough.

All in all, I don't think the difference in price (projections are awfully fickle) or at least utility is as clear as the OP suggests.

It's two different things, one is national the other local.

Local is more expensive since you are building right in the middle of populated areas. You have to get the land which is hard to do and expensive and when you do construction you are obstructing other traffic. The construction itself is more expensive too since you can't use very large machines to do it in bulk.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bullet-risks-2012051...

The lines themselves are very local to the areas they pass through, many of which are in populated areas.

But, if you are basically saying I am comparing apples with oranges, France's ongoing investment in urban light rail is currently eclipsing the United States by an embarrassing margin.

These are figures from 2009, so are a bit old and dusty, and they are from a pro-light rail source, but they say that France has committed $29 billion for urban rail, compared to the USA's $8 billion. http://www.lightrailnow.org/news/n_newslog2009q4.htm#LRT_200...

And this is just France, which has a population five times smaller than the USA. I could try and find figures for all light rail investment across Europe if you like, but then it would just start to look utterly ridiculous.

To give another comparison, The UK spent $8 billion just on widening the M1 motorway.

[edit] Although with that last figure, nobody is really sure where most of the money went. I personally suspect that they found a new and exciting way to create road surface entirely out of pulped ten pound notes and dried caviare.

The $8 billion number doesn't make sense in light of the link I posted of California alone spending $6 billion. (Maybe they hadn't budgeted the plan yet 3 years ago? But I assume this kind of stuff takes at least that long, if not longer.)

Maybe they only count federal money? But http://fta.dot.gov/grants/13442.html shows around $10 billion per year (the $29 billion is for multiple years) - not all of that is light rail specifically, but it's all infrastructure investment, and doesn't include local (state, city) money, nor any of the other federal departments.

I don't think the author understands what "Uncanny Valley" means. I get the pun, but its not apt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

makes sense to me: more is good, less is good, middle is not so good

Comparing the 2 densest boroughs of NYC to the entirety of the Bay Area seems pretty specious to me. Last time I looked, there was a giant sprawl of suburbs around that city too.

San Jose, which is ostensibly a city, is only a little more dense than Nassau County, which isn't anything like a city. Manhattan is more than four times as dense as San Francisco. Although there are a bunch of geographical barriers preventing super-high population density in the Bay Area, there's still a lot of room for more people.

This is pretty misleading because San Jose's density is very uneven. There are large parts of the city that are completely uninhabited.

Interestingly, San Francisco is the second most densely populated large city in the US after New York. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco

Quite true, but density ratings can always be a bit tricky as they vary a lot by how much extra land cities have.

San Jose's 5,000 per square mile underestimates what it feels like to live there.

See the borders: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=San+Jose,+CA&hl=en&sl...

All that area in the southeast are farms and mountains. A The entire northern part are marshes. Its "effective" density is really much closer to 7-8,000 per square mile.

Los Angeles is also one where the density numbers underestimate the feeling of it. https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Los+Angeles,+CA&hl=en&...

A lot of that land is mountains. Indeed, south-central and central parts of LA have about the same population as SF and pretty much the same density: http://projects.latimes.com/mapping-la/neighborhoods/populat...

He's not - he's comparing them to two of the densest cities in the Bay Area (San Francisco and San Jose). The New York boroughs each have a bit less than half the land area of their Bay Area equivalents, but have much higher populations.

In fact, now that I'm reading up, the closest equivalent to a borough is a county of the Bay Area (each borough was originally a county, before the NYC consolidation of 1898).

This is so stupid. Do the proponents of these positions ever acknowledge that maybe the Bay Area likes the current density trajection and maybe part of the Bay Area's charm is that it's not New York?

What the heck do you mean by 'the Bay Area likes ...'

Some people living in the Bay Area like the current density. Some people living there would like it more dense.

There are probably also people wishing these youngsters would move out and the whole area would turn into farmland again.

To me, denser is better. Denser means shorter commutes. Denser means lower rents. Denser means more energy efficient. Denser means more hospitalable to public transportation. Denser means more vibrate neighborhoods.

This book is a worthwhile read:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0078XGJXO/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

He's a generally left-leaning guy arguing for fewer regulations and more markets in housing. I found it quite convincing.

Upgrading Caltrain is probably the most cost effective solution on infrastructure. There are several great ideas out there: http://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/

Also allowing higher buildings along Caltrain corridor would be the easiest solution. That way population can grow without putting much stress on interstates. Moreover, It will be a boost vibrant places (e.g. think Castro St. in Mountain View).

There are plenty of houses in Tracy, CA, about 50 mins east of SF. You can get a 4 br 3 ba house for around $250k. It was also one of the "ground zeroes" for the housing bust, because those $250k homes were going for $650k in 2005.

You can drive 20 mins west to the Dublin BART and be in SF within 30 mins. My commute was 50 mins every day without traffic, so it ends up being comparable.

I think your numbers are a bit off. I live in Livermore (25 minutes West of Tracy), and it takes me at least 45 mins to drive to SF (if there's no traffic). It's nice that BART comes as far as it does, but it's a 45 minute ride to SF, and that doesn't even include the 15 mins (30-40 from Tracy) drive to get to the station.

I get your point that Tracy has available housing, but I think a 1.5+ hour commute makes it a much less appealing solution than the 50 mins you mentioned.

I think automobiles work fine in most of the Bay Area (obviously excepting SF).

I wonder if the author understands the distinction between San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and the Bay Area.

I don't think NYC has the same earth quake risks as San Jose. Still, it's hard to look at moving to the valley given the current housing and commute situation. Earth-quake proof caves of steel???

That excuse is fairly invalid, since there are many highrises in SF, and Vancouver Canada seems to not have much of a problem making their entire downtown core largely high rise.

While this drives up costs, San Francisco has plenty of tall buildings that are quite safe.

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