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Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

There is a famous paper about the location of company headquarters: they get as close as possible to the residence of company CEOs. If we don't consider the CEO's influence, I'm actually curious if the location of company headquarters has to do with the average age of the employees in the Bay Area. As the employees start to have families, they most likely move to the south bay for better or for worse, and I have a hard time imagine that they'd enjoy commuting via BART or Caltrain for more than an hour every day. And this is probably just me or my circles, a city's hustle and bustle becomes a distraction or at least increasing irrelevant as I age. I increasingly enjoy ample parking space, tranquil suburbs, being able to step out and start jogging in woods or huge parks, and certainly not having to deal with the craziness on SF streets. If more people are like me who prefers living outside of the city proper, then I'd imagine a company will have access to more talent by moving its headquarters to the south of SF.

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Just in response to your second point, I do think that's specific to you and your circles. I know multiple retired or semi-retired people who have moved towards the center of a city. Without work to keep them occupied, they want the hustle and bustle, which means something to do. And driving has become more of a hassle and a barrier to the kinds of lives they want to live. These are east coast or midwest cities, so maybe there is something about SF that's different, but that's my experience.

Also, a lot of older people don't want big houses, and having easy access to amenities and socialization is more important than having extra empty bedrooms.

Very true. At least to me, a modest condo will be more than enough, as I've learned long before that tidiness brings more pleasure than large space.

I will get downvoted for this comment: Size of living area does seem to be highly influenced by gender. I hear many more men say they would be happy living in a smaller place. I never once heard that from a woman under 50. (After the kids are gone, they may wish to downsize.)

Men are just content to have less, usually.

Also, are these single men with hobbies that don't take up a lot of space like gardening or woodworking?

Let me be the first one then - I am fully content on living in a 40-60m2 space with my partner and two cats. Considering we never lived in anything bigger this size is perfect for us, easy to clean and still enough space to live.

I am confused. I wrote: "many more men say they would be happy living in a smaller place". Are you saying that in your reply? It is unclear to me.

They were replying to part where you said:

> I never once heard that from a woman under 50.

You're talking about different age groups. You mention retired people (who are likely empty nesters), but the age group OP is talking about are middle-aged CEOs with young kids or teenagers.

Cities' attractiveness feels u-shaped

Young adults love it bc they have the time to go to bars/restaurants/clubs

Middle aged folks hate it because they're so busy - they can't take advantage, and other people get in their way

(some) Older folks like it again bc they have the time to go to restaurants/theater

Exactly this. I grew up on a farm, was a student in the city, started a family in the countryside and I want to retire in a city, as long as it’s close to my children.

Did you… did you, ah, raise spiders on the family farm?

Is that a Thing? I'm so behind /s

Well, check out their username

oops. right.

I've polled my friends about this, and our group is a about 50/50. Some of us when looking at comments never read the usernames, we just completely skip over it. And some alway do - the next is right there of course you'd read it!

It seems like an interesting dichotomy - I didn't see any obvious correlation between other traits in my informal survey but I am very curious to see if there is some set of personality traits that correlates with reading vs ignoring user names.

I don't skip commentor names intentionally, but HN makes it really easy with the stupid (not sorry) light grey on slightly darker grey text. Contrast is an accessibility issue, and HN sucks at it.

My first ever online project was creating a spider (bot) so that has been my username ever since.

Middle ages folks hate it because they are most likely to have kids and cities (in the US) tend to be kid hostile. What I'm calling city below is probably better described as downtown - most cities extend out farther and have areas that are nothing like what follows - but are also nothing like what you described as what people move to the city for.

Parks in the city tend to be focused on art. They often lack kid basics like swings and sand. They tend to be too small for a ball game. Often the people who are there will yell at kids for running off the path, yelling and the other ways kids play.

Bars and clubs are not kid friendly places. Middle age folks are much less interested. If you are middle aged and hang out in a bar you are an alcoholic. Clubs often have an minimum age, so going means an expensive babysitter. (bars might allow kids to eat there).

Theater is similar to bars - kids might not be banned, but they are not really welcome either. Both because the shows are not what kids would be interested in, and because they will kick out the kids if they are noisy (which they will be - not kid friendly shows).

Restaurants will allow kids, but often you get dirty looks for bring kids. Many of the others do not like kids and will let you know if your kids are misbehaving - what they define as misbehaving is normal for kids.

Then we add in costs - all of the above is affordable when it is just 1 or two adults, but with kids it is either a lot more expensive to bring this with or you hire a babysitter. You also need larger apartments - most are 1 or 2 bedrooms, but a family wants at least 3 and likely more. You can buy a house in the suburbs with 4 bedrooms and other extra rooms for less than the month payment on a city apartment.

Last there are schools which tend to be bad quality. I've concluded that this because of the other factors above - few families live there and so not enough people care to make them good. It does however stop many families that might want to try living in the city.

Cities are far more kid-friendly than suburbs, especially for kids from age ~9–18. Everything is walkable or can be reached by transit, many more amenities and activities are accessible, kids are dramatically less dependent on parents or other caretakers to constantly chaperone them, and there are a wider variety of other kids around with many niche interests.

Some kids' parents irrationally believe cities will be bad for their kids for one reason or another or consider the suburbs to be more personally convenient for the parents. For the kids themselves, cities are wonderful while suburbs are often boring and repressive.

> For the kids themselves, cities are wonderful and suburbs are often a kind of prison

I grew up in a mega city and I agree that cities are wonderful for kids, at least they were wonderful for me and my friends. I'd venture to guess that kids don't care. Cities or not, the world is just so much fun and exciting.

I don't know if suburbs are prisons for kids, though. My kids love suburbs, and they also love cities when they spend days and nights there.

It's not that parents falsely think that cities are bad for kids (it may be a factor for some people, of course), but that parents themselves do not want to live in a busy city. For instance, I have zero interest in bars or clubs. In fact, they are way noisy for my social needs. Instead, I just want to have walking distance to woods and shaded trails. And I want to have access to those large club houses that have full gyms and swimming pools and cozy libraries and all kinds of activity rooms, instead of those smallish ones in SF (probably because I'm not wealthy enough, but that's also my point). Or take Asian supermarket for another example. There are really not that many choices in SF or NYC. Even for the available ones, let's say H Mart in NYC, I really don't like the cramped space. I want to have those spacious walkways and shelving and big food court and etc.

Suburbs can be prisons if there’s not enough people your age around you. I lived in semi-suburbs and had friends I’d walk to after school. Makes it more fun than having to organize car dates until someone gets a car. But nowadays kids are so supervised I don’t know if they hang outside anymore

> Suburbs can be prisons if there’s not enough people your age around you. I lived in semi-suburbs and had friends I’d walk to after school. Makes it more fun than having to organize car dates until someone gets a car. But nowadays kids are so supervised I don’t know if they hang outside anymore

Totally. There seem fewer kids in the neighborhood than before too. Play-date is such a suburb concept for the US kids. As a kid, I used to hang out with neighbor kids, sometimes more than a dozen, every day. Not any more for my kids in the suburb. To that end, I admire my Indian friends. Even during the most panicking days of Covid, they would organize weekly meetups of multiple families, so kids got to play together.

There are less kids outside, but that is just because families are so much smaller on average and there are less kids.

That seems like both a generational and cultural thing, vs a urban/sub-urban consideration. Prior generations in the US had kids just hangout with whomever in the neighborhood be it urban or sub-urban too. Playdates are probably just as common in urban areas now, the cultural change wasn't specific to the built-environment.

> And I want to have access to those large club houses that have full gyms and swimming pools and cozy libraries and all kinds of activity rooms, instead of those smallish ones in SF (probably because I'm not wealthy enough, but that's also my point).

Club houses? What are we talking about here? Country clubs? Our society is largely devoid of the fraternal organizations that colored 18th and 19th century social life, and the social isolation of not having any 'third places' to go is in fact one of principal complaints about suburbia.

>> Club houses? What are we talking about here? Country clubs? Our society is largely devoid of the fraternal organizations that colored 18th and 19th century social life, and the social isolation of not having any 'third places' to go is in fact one of principal complaints about suburbia.

I think they literally mean "Club house" -- the shared services center for the housing development. High-rises often have them, large developments have them.

In NYC, our high-rise had a reading room, yoga room, gym, entertainment center, as well as a paved playing area for building residents inside building premises. People met each other regularly at these places and socialized. This is very common (minus the paved playing area, which is rare.)

In the burbs we also have most of these, and also tennis courts and a pool.

Many of these served as a "Third Place" for residents, especially once you have kids because it isnt as easy to hang out elsewhere. Unlike previous centuries, I'm constantly on my phone or on call explicitly or implicitly, at least in my profession, so social clubs seem unrealistic, though I know the wealthy folks go there regularly.

This is either something in a luxury apartment building or an amenity you pay for via an HOA in a condo.

And what is your point?

Even cheap/mid tier apartment complexes around me have a clubhouse with a pool, a small gym, maybe a billiard table and what not. It is not very expensive to do when land is cheap.

My last apartment wasn't super high-end and it even had a golf simulator in it along with a billiard room kind of a theater room with a giant TV and some big couches.

> I don't know if suburbs are prisons for kids, though.

Personally, I grew up in a suburb that didn't have transit and it was miserable. I barely saw my friends until I got a car. Every time I go back with my lady it's miserable for both of us because, besides family, there's just nothing there but some cookie cutter parks. There was one historical park that's still nice but its also a mile away from my mom's house and there's inconsistent sidewalks (it's either take a much longer route or risk walking alongside a 1 ft wide shoulder with a 35mph speed limit and curves.

I suppose it heavily depends on the suburb.

> Instead, I just want to have walking distance to woods and shaded trails.

Most places that have woods at all also have this.

Golden gate park+presidio in SF, discovery+arboretum+Seward+ a bunch more in seattle, central park in NYC, fairmont park in Philly are all places I've loved walking/biking around (and to).

Please also consider that suburbs are often much cheaper to rent a 1800 sqft of living space (say a decent 3 BR 2 Bath) vs the city.

That's true. Housing is expensive because the city is great and people want to live here, but the direct results of expensive housing are harmful to the society (and high rent is a kind of giant tax on all economic activity, raising prices in shops, restaurants, etc.).

It would be a significant benefit to the people of SF if the western half of the city were significantly upzoned with a lot of new housing construction here and throughout the Bay Area, and ideally rent and house prices cut by something like half (gradually rather than in a market crash), so that more of the people necessary to run the city could afford to live here.

> Housing is expensive because the city is great and people want to live here,

If by "great" you mean "where the jobs are" then I agree.

That has been the primary driving force behind urbanization since at least the industrial era.

The jobs are in the city because the people are there, and the people are there because the jobs and other people are there. Empirically, both residents and employers prefer to relocate to the city.

The city is convenient and fun: it provides easier transportation, more amenities, more other people to engage with, more companies of all types to do business with, etc.

You ignore the fact that many European cities are much smaller than the North American mega city landscape and still have lots of jobs in those cities. But it's also easier to have safer yet walkable and publicly transportabel neighborhoods in a city of 150k or 300k than 3 or 10 million.

There's plenty of American cities from 50k-300k, that's not a uniquely European thing.

None of the jobs where I grew up were in the city (Allentown/Bethlehem/Easton, largest employers were all suburban campuses save for the electric company and some colleges. Even the hospitals were off the highway.).

All the fun stuff was in the city though, so that's where we'd go once you got a friend of driving age.

If you run a business selling a niche amenity, you need to do so in a city because in the country you won't have enough customers nearby.

End result: cities have more fine-grained amenities. People who want more amenities live in cities.

There are? I see the opposite trend (at least in US East Coast) - cities only have generic amenities, while all the unusual stuff is in the suburbs, where the the land is cheap.

For example, let's take a relatively common hobby of sewing. The two stores in downtown closed tens of years ago, and the only ones left are in the suburbs, unreachable without the car.

I think at this stage, the only advantage of city is bars, restaurants, and expensive clothing/jewelry. If you like something else, you are better off in suburbs with a car.

> (and high rent is a kind of giant tax on all economic activity, raising prices in shops, restaurants, etc.)

I’ve long pointed out to conversation mates IRL that for a technological civilization like ours, shelter costs are a straight deadweight, Tsiolkovsky rocket equation cost upon the innovation throughput that is the civilization’s lifeblood. In the U.S., healthcare pricing policies are as well, but that’s a different conversation. Both are stranded capital that need unlocking towards increasing the technological development pace.

But most people with mortgages are trapped like a monkey’s fist around a fruit in a jar, by the siren song of house appreciation.

I’d rather have fusion, life extension, solar system colonization, mind uploads and AGI sooner than be “rich” in real estate.

The purpose of capitalism is not technological advancement, innovation, or efficient deployment of resources. The purpose of capitalism is that rich people get paid for being rich.

If you believe otherwise, you will learn the hard way when you seek your reforms and find that none of the people spouting the high-minded capitalist rhetoric support the actions that would bring it closer to reality. In short, the monkey's hand isn't trapped. The monkey is masturbating into the jar. It knows exactly what it is doing and you will not be thanked for interrupting.

This assumes that the parents consider the city safe enough for the kids to wander around unsupervised. The perceptions may be bullshit, but people still act on them. Statistically speaking the schools in the city are going to score lower on pretty much every test than the suburban ones, sometimes by large margins.

By far the biggest danger for children wandering around (in rural area, suburb, or city) is big cars moving quickly. But none of the suburbanites worried about cities seem to mind that there are SUVs whizzing around their residential neighborhoods at 40+ miles per hour. (Or more realistically, plenty do worry, and keep the kids indoors or drive them everywhere instead of letting them wander around independently.)

> Statistically speaking the schools in the city are going to score lower

This has more to do with the more diverse mix of children in the class than it does to do with school or teacher quality per se.

But I'm happy to grant you that some upper middle class parents are also inordinately worried that their children might spend too much time near poorer children who get worse test scores because their families have fewer resources and they were not as academically prepared.

> But none of the suburbanites worried about cities seem to mind that there are SUVs whizzing around their residential neighborhoods at 40+ miles per hour.

The pavements are often much wider in suburbs, and/or separated from the road by trees. That's the difference. You're not in a high rise apartment building that opens directly on to pavement, which is 4ft from a road.

Empirically the most dangerous cities for pedestrians are sprawling ones with large high-speed-limit pedestrian-hostile roads, not denser ones with walkable streets.

But that most places in the USA are pretty unsafe for pedestrians nowadays, especially children. We would do well to introduce traffic calming, improve pedestrian/bike infrastructure, and cut speed limits in all areas where people commonly walk down to a max of about 20 miles/hour.

It would also make streets much safer to reduce the proportion of SUVs and large pickup trucks. Disincentivizing these vehicles should be an explicit government policy goal.

Those are all great ideas, but to the average voter you might as well be saying we should outlaw apple pie. Political will behind reforms like this is very hard to find and always in danger of being voted out by angry drivers.

> Empirically the most dangerous cities for pedestrians are sprawling ones with large high-speed-limit pedestrian-hostile roads, not denser ones with walkable streets.

Can you cite this?

I think it’s a pity you’re getting downvoted, I think it’s a very valid opinion and one that I think is getting underrepresented in this thread.

That’s it I’m moving back to the city.

> Parks in the city tend to be focused on art. They often lack kid basics like swings and sand.

Leaving NYC my son was disappointed in almost any park we'd go to. Most smaller cities and towns have a few decent playgrounds but in the city we had 3-4 in walking distance that were amazing and another 10 within a single subway stop.

Where in NYC?

Greenpoint/Williamsburg

San Francisco has really really good playgrounds, it's quite crazy.

> Parks in the city tend to be focused on art. They often lack kid basics like swings and sand. They tend to be too small for a ball game. Often the people who are there will yell at kids for running off the path, yelling and the other ways kids play.

This doesn’t describe Seattle or any other city I’ve lived in. We literally have 3 huge ball fields within walking distance of my town home, all full up on weekends and even most weekday nights with soccer, baseball, etc…

> what they define as misbehaving is normal for kids.

Right, sprinting back-and forth, ear-piercing screams at the top of their lungs, kicking chairs - all things we should just accept at a restaurant, for the sake of the parents. What terrible people we are for wanting a decent dining experience.

You were a helpless, innocent kid once too :)

When I was a kid, going to a restaurant was a treat and a privilege. If my sister or I misbehaved, we were taken out to the car, and might not get to go to a restaurant again for a while.

I see kids in restaurants these days and mostly find their behavior appalling. And it's sad the best-behaved kids are only quiet because they have an iPad in front of them. (No headphones, of course, so that's another annoyance the rest of us have to put up with.)

Its just common courtesy.

Same as minimizing the amount of flights you have with a baby.

People with a baby that take multiple flying trips a year are rude, bordering on douchey.

Just because you want an experience doesn't mean you get to ruin it for hundreds of others. Who not to mention paid for it. Height of egocentrism.

When I was a kid the only restaurant I was allowed to go to was Friendly's, and only on my/my siblings birthdays. It was a HUGE treat and I knew to be on my very best behavior because if there was any acting up, even a little, I wouldn't be allowed out to eat out ever again.

Nowadays kids aren't expected to behave in a restaurant, so they don't. It's about expectations.

my parents did not bring a 3 year old crying baby into an airport lounge

> "Restaurants will allow kids, but often you get dirty looks for bring kids. Many of the others do not like kids and will let you know if your kids are misbehaving - what they define as misbehaving is normal for kids."

Any child older than a toddler should be able to sit quietly and respectfully eat a meal. If they can't, that's bad parenting.

Sitting still for long periods is naturally difficult for little kids. Of course they shouldn’t be allowed to go nuts, but a kid who just sits quietly for long periods with no signs of antsiness might be having their spirit crushed by authoritarian parents (or might just be unusually calm). Good parenting is a give and take.

The restaurant isn't going to complain about the kids chatting or pushing peas around on their plate. If the wait staff are willing to risk the ire of pissed off parents to say something, the kids must be going nuts.

It's very variable. There's also a lot of inertia once people are established in the suburbs/exurbs. I know some examples but I don't actually know a ton of cases of people moving into the city upon retirement.

For another couple data points - my middle aged friends with kids who moved to my city did so for much of the same reason as you suggest the younger and older folks do. There's just more services for their kids: clubs, day care, pediatrics, playgrounds, sports teams, museums, etc. I have a few middle aged friends who moved away from my city, but they moved to bigger cities (Chicago, NYC) for work.

Curious, if you ever see this - where in the city did they move? Like an inner suburb/outer ring of the city? Into a block of townhouses/condos? Near family/friends?

I'm curious how folks who happily live in the city with kids approach it

Don't forget access to doctors and hospitals. I browse city-data at times out of boredom, and it's a major concern for retired people considering relocating anywhere.

In fact I know a retired guy who moved to Maui, and then moved back. The principal reason was the saying they have, "If you have a pain, get on a plane."

You might get served in Honolulu. Quite often you're flying to the mainland, though.

That said, living right in the city isn't necessary at all. The 'burbs have almost every facility you could want.

For people aging and not in the best of health, declining vision/response times makes driving riskier, and there is often a preference for homes without stairs as well, which might very well be a condo with an elevator. Then there’s also common area maintenance in condos vs. the manual labor of lawn care, pool care, etc.

I lived in Maui for a year and it was always in the back of my mind that my link to civilization was basically one road. And my apartment was just north of Lahaina.

That said I watched my dad die of cancer and let's just say he would have been better off chillin' on a beach or a balcony staring out into the ocean.

The doctors couldn't really do anything other than misdiagnose him and then put him on meds way too late.

I'd pick quality of life over fear of a potential medical issue.

I told this guy I had rotator cuff surgery. One week wait for an MRI, and three for the surgery.

He said the MRI would have been a 4-week wait in Hawaii.

But it's a choice, for sure. There are lots of medical time wasters that are not life-threatening.

It almost makes retiring to Southeast Asia reasonable. Yes, you don’t get Medicare, but then paying out of pocket reasonable prices for medical services means you aren’t eating for anything either, plus you get the beach and affordable everything else living. As long as you don’t get cancer.

> you aren’t eating for anything either

?? might be a typo but I don't know for what

Agreed. My family lives on an island, though not in HI. We've had to do the medivac on one occasion. Yeah it was a bit unnerving and a major pain in the ass but we're still here a few years later.

I'd much rather optimize for the happy days than the shitty ones.

Palo Alto is suburbs. It is also home to the best medical care in the world...

Better than Rochester, MN?

I don't know, the residential neighborhoods of SF are the perfect place to raise a family if you make tech money: dense enough that there is a ton of stuff to do and your kid knows other kid nearby, low density enough that you get 1500-2500sqft to yourself.

turn of the century suburbs truly are goldilocks neighborhoods.

genuinely curious which century you mean?

This is a depressingly good question. I hadn't ever considered we'd be far enough into this one to refer back to the 90's and early aughts as "turn of the century"

That's why I use the French term "fin-de-siècle" which is well understood by educated English speakers and yet always refers to the end of the 19th century without additional qualifications.

Define “educated” and cite the survey showing how well understood it is among “English speakers” (British English? Commonwealth Nations Generally? N.A. English Speakers? Non-native/ESL?)

I use “fortnightly” to mean “in 2 weeks” because bi-weekly is ambiguous, and while the game is hugely popular I still assume at least 1 person on any email chain with me reads that and is thinking “the fuck does he talk like a Victorian English Dandy for?”

> the French term "fin-de-siècle" which is well understood by educated English speakers

This may not be as well understood as you believe. I am an educated English speaker, who has many educated English speaking friends and family, I have never heard this phrase.

I agree with the other commenters that this is obscure. I coincidentally heard the term for the first time about 3 days ago (in the context of "socialism by fin-de-siècle" - the expectation that communism was inevitable among the left wing at that time.

Turn of the millennium?

I'm sure he meant the early 1900s. I've usually heard these called "streetcar suburbs" for obvious reasons. They tend to have a good mix of urban and suburban vibes. Unlike the car-focused developments after the war, these neighborhoods are super walkable with local retail or other spots just a stroll away, or a short streetcar hop. The design is all about pedestrians, with narrow streets, plenty of sidewalks, and often tree-lined avenues. The houses, seem to have been more often built by skilled craftsmen, and have unique architectural details, unlike the cookie-cutter homes you see in later post-war suburbs.

This is all true (if only we could go back in time!) but don’t let selection bias ruin reality.

Most homes were crappy, only the ones built by skilled craftsmen survived. This was also the era that spawned protections against tenements.

Crappy? I'm not so sure about that. I've lived at maybe 15 Southern New England addresses in my life and the three built after 1920 were the cheapest quality. And it's not like they were one in a dozen, or even 1 in 3: from cheap triple deckers to mansions, the area I live is packed full of buildings from that era. The knob and tube electricity has mostly been replaced, but most places I've lived still had gas lamp pipe nipples sticking out of the walls in the common hallways. The entire area is jam packed with buildings from that era.

>were the cheapest quality

In what sense? I think people conflate "big brick building" with "quality". Sure, it's nice, as is some of the labour-intensive finishing work from that era. But nearly every bit of a modern house is "higher quality" than a home built 100+ ago, thanks mostly to the building code.

(please don't link me some story of a shoddy builder)

but all those buildings are up to code now too right? And the fact that people keep them occupied for so long and renovate speaks to their intrinsic quality I'd think.

but tbh - quality is somewhat a red herring. Today, quality is all because there is caulk (greatest invention), plumbing, and longer lasting paint. Yesteryear, quality was because they used all natural materials which are unaffordable now. Either way, keep a house dry and occupied, and it will stand for centuries, regardless of when it was built.

Homes in greater Boston are definitely not all or even mostly up to code now. My old ~1900 greater Boston apartment still had live knob-and-tube wiring. Fortunately the 1880 home I own now was thoroughly rewired and now more or less in line with the electric code, although it’s still far from modern building code in other domains (plumbing, rafter spacing, insulation, stair rise/run, list goes on).

In some important ways quality was due to the availability of materials, but cheap labor played a big role too. Many building practices before WWII were extremely labor-intensive compared to today. Lathe and plaster walls, knob and tube, board sheathing, fieldstone/rubble foundations, mortise door hardware, etc.

My 1850 triple-decker has code compliant electrical and plumbing, egresses, common area lighting and dual exits. Definitely not accessible and the stairs are typical for the era— the last big brick building I lived in that was built around 1900 was super solid but the stairs were murder— like 7" treads and it was a 4th floor walkup.

Building code hasn't always been an improvement. There's the cost-economic side too.

E.g. the replacement of plaster walls with sheetrock and massive beams with dimensional lumber

We didn't do those things because they're better: we did them because they're cheaper.

On the other hand, modern insulation, vapor barrier, windows, and electrical are strictly superior to what came before.

> In what sense? I think people conflate "big brick building" with "quality". Sure, it's nice, as is some of the labour-intensive finishing work from that era. But nearly every bit of a modern house is "higher quality" than a home built 100+ ago,

Thin walls, poor sound insulation, poor thermal insulation, poor structural durability, poor quality building materials, poor quality flooring— cheap.

> (please don't link me some story of a shoddy builder)

I don't need to link you to anything because I'm talking about places I've lived and as of thus, I've presented exactly as much empirical evidence as you have. And few of the building were brick— almost all of the places I've lived were timber framed. Look up pictures of Southern New England neighborhoods if you want to see what I'm talking about. The television show "This Old House" is entirely based on renovating New England homes from that supposedly poor quality era and it's been on since 1979.

It's clearly different where you live. I know about a half dozen carpenters, including my best friend of thirty years, and every single one of them deliberately sought a house from this era because they are excellent quality.

> thanks mostly to the building code.

The building code will reduce the risk of fires and reduce the risk of dying in them if they occur, it will ensure that people looking to make a quick buck flipping a shoddy will have a harder time doing so, it will ensure your plumbing will probably work for a while— but better building materials were much cheaper, as was skilled labor, and there were quite a number of known good designs for the areas quirks with weather, etc. They were generally just plain-old good?

Selection bias, houses from <1920 that weren’t nice have been torn down. “Only the good ones survived”.

Is this really true? Unless urban renewal demolished them wholesale, all late 19th century neighborhoods exist virtually fully intact. There was no filtering of low quality vs high quality.

Beyond that, in the area I refer to, Southern New England, the vast majority of those buildings are still in everyday regular use, and with the exception of obsolete institutional or industrial buildings, very few have been demolished. Of course, some got leveled to build bigger buildings, but not that many. I would say 95% of residential buildings within a mile of me are from 1915 or earlier, most of them timber framed, and my neighborhood has about 15k people per square mile, so it's a decent sample size.

Sorry, yes, 19th to 20th century. Neighborhoods with the Full House house basically.

Unfortunately the US demolished such urban structures to make space for cars and parking spaces. We now get a small downtown with clusters of skyscrapers, and then endless urban sprawl. It definitely made the cities of the US ugly, especially when compared to the European cities.

They still exist in the northeast megalopolis where space to build postwar sprawl was limited.

I am visiting Boston and I cannot stop wondering why SF is not like that. The city feels so much more livable almost everywhere I went. I'm sure there are shady parts, but every time I need to go to SF for some reason I get really depressed.

Respectfully, you’re almost certainly going to the wrong parts. My source is that I grew up inside Boston and now reside inside SF.

Boston is amazing, and I love it. But SF is too. For similar reasons. SF is a city of neighborhoods. If you’re going to downtown, or any of the business centers, you’re not getting the good parts. The enjoyable nice parts of SF are all residential. Because of the hills, each residential neighborhood (a valley) has its own unique commercial street full of shops and restaurants, surrounded by beautiful old townhomes, and as you go up the hills you get vistas and nice homes. The city quality is inversely correlated with office space.

Boston has similar historic driving forces - instead of hills, it used to be a city of (now infilled) peninsulas. You get wonderful old homes in Boston, and lots of streets full of shops. Instead of tech money (which Boston also has) it was overrun first by the education industry, which anchors many neighborhoods today.

could you expand on what you mean by "the education industry"?

I was picturing an army of teachers, but I don't normally think of teachers as folks who earn enough to be compared to tech money :)

I've never been to Boston, but Wikipedia tells me they have several universities - Harvard and MIT, which I've heard of, and also Boston University, Boston College, University of Massachusetts Boston, Bentley University, Brandeis University, Tufts University, Northeastern University, Wentworth Institute of Technology and a load of others.

In a city with a population of 600k that's going to be a decent part of the local economy.

Yes, Boston is considered the educational capital of the planet.

Boston itself is about 700,000 people, but if you extend things to a 20 mile radius from Boston (say from DTX), in that area there is a transient student population of 400,000 people that are only there to attend higher education and ultimately call elsewhere home. Within 20 miles of Boston are several dozen (nearly 60?) universities, making education one of its six or seven tent-pole industries.

To be pedantic, MIT and most of Harvard is Cambridge--across the river from the city of Boston. But, yes, the Boston area has a very university-influenced vibe much of it urban with some exceptions like BC and Wellesley.

We do not need you or Wikipedia to tell is that Boston University, Boston College, and University of Massachusetts Boston are in Boston.

There are something like 30 universities in the Boston metro, including some extremely press and wealthy ones. Universities like Harvard and MIT have sprawling research industrial complex’s beyond teaching students. And many thousands of employees, many of whom are high paid professionals.

All that to say nothing of the students. The population of Boston itself is ~600k, while the metro region has ~4M people and roughly 300k students reside in the metro. These are obviously not all local students, but students from all over the world who have come to Boston for education.

I didn’t mean directly that the schools had money, but that neighborhoods and civic fabric was built around the universities. But many do have a lot of money. Students tend not to travel far, so you get lots of self-contained neighborhoods around school. Similar to SF where the hills limit how far you’d walk.

Some of them are even within the borders of cities! See, for example, much of Queens, NY. Forest Hills is especially pretty. If you're not a New York, go back and watch the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies and marvel (ha) over the difference between where Aunt May lives and where Peter works.

They still exist, but they are generally absurdly expensive because lots of people want to live there and they aren't particularly dense (although denser than plenty of other areas)

Yes they are. We don't have enough of them and should make more.

Literally all of Philadelphia (and its suburbs going quite far out) resembles this, thanks to rowhouses which allow true single family you-own-your-own-land-with-your-own-(tiny)-yard housing while still hitting enough density to get economies of scale and insanely great walkability. It would be paradise on earth if the public schools were good.

Queens is like this too (except I have no idea about public school quality there, and it's probably hard to afford these days -- but balanced by access to the Manhattan job market)

Governments need to accept that winner-take-all massive metro areas are the way of the future and just adjust zoning and incentives to flood the zone with transportation and housing (which help substitute for and encourage each other anyway), otherwise you're stuck choosing between affordable housing and access to education and jobs. Concentrating more jobs nearby creates more than the sum of their parts because workers are often more productive in industry clusters.

SF schools and traffic are terrible with kids. Suburbs are generally much mellower.

I mean this depends on what specifically you’re optimizing for.

A child in the suburb will need a chauffeur to get anywhere outside their immediate subdivision, and sometimes within it. Children are perfectly capable of taking public transit and using their two feet, though.

Have you not heard of school buses or soccer moms?

Cities like SF tend to be okay for families in two different (and polar opposite) classes - those who are working poor, and the scare factor of public transit and hassle of traffic is something they just have to deal with, or quite wealthy - and they can afford drivers and/or private schools.

The public school system in SF is also notoriously terrible to deal with, even by US big city standards, as ‘equity’ changes results in bussing kids all over town so there are no ‘good’/‘bad’ schools due to demographics. So siblings will often end up in schools on different sides of town, or kids in a school very far from where they live.

The middle class tends to go to the suburbs where things are less crazy and easier to handle, and they get ‘bad’ things like a school where all the neighbors kids also go, and siblings can all be in the same school. And they can buy into a ‘good school district’. Among other things.

Yeah, I’m saying that parents can choose to live in cities to avoid being just a soccer parent forever.

School bus routes have been decimated in much of the country, creating long winding routes with horrible wake up times for children. And a school bus doesn’t take you to any place outside of school and the home.

Growing up as a school child in New York with a transit pass, it was nice to hang out with friends, or go to a museum, or head to a new park, or try a new restaurant, or any number of things without having to involve parents for transport. And I went to a pretty good public school.

I’m glad that all parents in suburbs are clearly wrong?

who said they're clearly wrong? i'm just saying that kids can be in cities.

I never said they couldn’t?

SFUSD only busses kids with special needs. Everybody else has to get to school on their own.

Siblings get preference for the same school, so it's pretty unlikely they'd be on different sides of town.

SFUSD has tons of problems but you are not accurate in your description of what they are.

The real problem is that the kids of parents who can't drive them to school end up having to go to a local school anyway, so the egalitarian idea of having kids go to any school did not actually work out as a positive for anybody but kids who were already privileged enough to have someone drive them to school.

Kids still get driven to school in cities.

They don’t have to though, which is nice. And not all children do.

SFUSD lotto system, and the schools being far away enough. Yeah, everyone I know in sf drives their kids to school

I've heard about the lotto system but assumed the school district would be obligated to bus kids (i.e. not force them to use public transit alone). The parents have issues with the school bus??

Why don't the kids take the school bus

Some kind of lotto system

I made choices to live near a K-8 and high school, so hopefully my kid is walking from K to 12.

Kids still get driven to school in my neighborhood that wont let you enroll if you're more than a mile or so away (officially it's a walking school). Yet every day the street it's on becomes packed with cars trying to pick their child up instead of just letting them walk home.

no, as a kid I was able to go anywhere I desired with a bike or skateboard; I had few boring summer days.

this is much safer/practical in suburban environments. do you really believe public transport, in SF, is as safe for a kid?

e: md fix

Kids are, quite frankly, much smarter and more capable than modern helicopter parents give them credit for.

BART is, quite frankly, much grimmer and less safe than you seem to give it credit for.

That doesn't matter anymore because although kids are probably as smart as they've ever been, everyone has a cellphone in their pocket and will rat the family out to CPS if the child exhibits independence.

Just don’t drive.

We bailed for seattle because we could get a bigger house and have a better school situation. We did enjoy living on the border between the mission and noe valley before that though.

I’m reading this from Ballard and I think we do alright on school quality and house size, although my east side colleagues think the deal is better in more suburban Kirkland or Bellevue.

Ballard hardly has houses left, it's a condo jungle now.

Townhome jungle. We still have lots of single family homes, especially north of 65th.

Without the townhomes it would be even more unaffordable.

Seattle is an interesting area, so many different pockets. I moved to Seattle in 2016 from Southern California, could never shake the depression. Moved to Cupertino in Jan and am as happy as a (very busy) clam.

I visited Seattle the city proper recently, and also felt depressed. Not sure why I got that vibe. On paper Seattle is great, and no-doubt, the Pacific north west has good nature and tech-industry. It felt odd why Seattle felt "different".

The weather? it's well documented. SAAD.

Seasonal Affective Disorder, i.e. lack of sun? Not sure what the other A stands for.

The Seattle Freeze seems like one of those broad stereotypes, but I experienced it as very real. People are not unfriendly, but they are unsocial. I felt lonelier than any other place I've lived. There are of course many other factors, but I'm not the only one, which is validating.

Except schools, crime, and kids able to get into trouble.

> if you make tech money

It is a great tragedy that the US with all its money and diversity of geography and people has only really managed to produce a single walkable city and a scattered handful of “I don’t always use my car” neighborhoods, which are always the most expensive places to live. So many cities outside the US manage to do this on a fraction of the budget.

So many cities outside the US manage to have this as the only redeeming quality. It's nice to not have to walk - it's not so great to have to walk because you can't afford a car and public transit does not cut it for everyone even in the best rated cities of the world. And it's not really interesting to have a dense train network if you can't afford the train ticket; then you're just angry your tax money is spent on it instead of you.

I'm from Europe but I would be very careful with claiming it's just a few cities or neighborhoods in the US. I made a list of places I could move to eventually, and it's at least two dozen, and that's just because I was focused on cities with significant tech/business scene.

Everyone wants what they can't have. Europeans want to drive in cities/suburbs and Americans want to walk. People in Paris/Madrid don't really value walkability all that much. It's an increasing trend to buy bigger and bigger SUVs.

> Europeans want to drive in cities/suburbs

No, I don't. Thank you.

Soccer moms disagree with you. In my area they actually removed bike lanes to make way for more traffic.

Where I live in London there are football (soccer) pitches in most local parks, school grounds, etc, which kids tend to use. Most people have such a park in a 5-10 minute walk from their home. No need to drive for such short distances. It's better for kids to walk around and experience their neighbourhood, use the time walking to chat with their friends, etc.

Where I live in Texas there are football (soccer) pitches in most local parks, school grounds, etc, which kids tend to use. Also often baseball fields and sometimes tennis courts as well. Most people here have such a park in a 10-minute walk from their home.

The majority (dare I say all?) of European kids just take public transport/their bikes to wherever they're going, from a young age. I took the bus 1.5 hours 1 direction every day to go to my swim practice starting from age 10, sometimes at night too.

I don't really think soccer moms are a thing outside of the US

The percentage of commutes by car in Northern and Southern European cities ranges from 50% to 75%

I’m not sure where Americans get the idea Europeans don’t commute by car.

We're talking about kids here though, not all commuters.

And at least in the Netherlands, sample size of my office (around 300 people) maybe a dozen people max commute by car because they live ~2 hours away or in tiny villages where the trains are only hourly rather than every 10 minutes. I'd assume that metric varies a lot depending on the country you're looking at, and if we're talking about how kids go to school/practice/wherever, I'm willing to bet even in car-heavy European countries that the vast majority of kids take public transport or their bikes.

I have friends with kids in the (rural) North of the Netherlands, and their kid's school is ~15km away from their house. The kids bike that every day, to quote my friend, "they've got legs and wheels, why would I chauffeur them around?"

"The majority" seems strong. When I was in middle school (collège in french), there was a long line of cars in front of the school entrance from parents dropping off their kids. At some point my friend and I started to take the RER to go back home, and we barely saw anyone else.

Of course, part of the situation was we were in a mostly-residential city, so most kids lived less than a twenty minutes' walk away. But those who didn't mostly came by car.

That's in the city, though. I don't know what things are like in the countryside. From what my friends tell me, they had to take a lot of public bus to go to school and places. I think soccer moms were more of a thing there, because you had a hard time getting anywhere without a car. Less hard than the US, but still.

>I took the bus 1.5 hours 1 direction every day to go to my swim practice starting from age 10, sometimes at night too.

This sounds terrible. I would much prefer driving 10 minutes to my suburban sports complex.

Statistically Europeans have longer commutes than Americans because they rely on public transport more while Americans drive and driving is almost always faster than surface public transport since not all Europeans have an underground in their city so public transport is often a slow an infrequent bus in tier 2 cities.

The more people drive, the worse the traffic. And if public transport has to be stuck in traffic, then driving is always faster.

Now this setting sounds familiar... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

> I took the bus 1.5 hours 1 direction every day

And you'd take that 1.5hr each way (three hours of commute to go to swim practice, every day??) over having a parent (or a family friend carpooling) spend maybe 10-15 minutes driving you each way?

> Americans want to walk

They actually don't. I mean I do. My wife does, and one or two of our friends do. But almost everyone else we know aren't at all interested in having a walkable city. They love their cars and garages. US cities are the way they are because a great majority of Americans want them that way.

It 100% bums me out, but that's where we are at. Americans that want to walk are a small minority.

Children don't have the patience of parents. They melt down waiting for a bus/transit in snow or summer broiling heat and it becomes a nightmare. I didn't have a car most the time until I had a kid and found quality of life went way up with a car.

I was born in a walkable in Europe. School was 5 minutes (by walk) from home. High school was 10-15 minutes by bus, plus 10 minutes walking to the bus stops. The bus service was very frequent, there was no endless waiting on bus stops in snow or heat. If Communist Poland could pull it of, so could the richest country in the world.

Getting to school works but that's because everyone on the bus is going the same place.

A child can walk to say a cornerstore in the US many places no problem but the parents will be placed under arrest for negligence. Most any other place they'd like to go is most practical with public transit involving a long wait or driving by what appears to the child as a private car chartered at his convenience.

There are no school buses in Polish cities. I was using regular city transit buses, just like grownups do when going to their jobs.

Same thing in Singapore, kids from grade 7 on take public transport to go to school (earlier grade students live close to the school usually). I think Japan is like that too.

Yeah, for a while I used to get around by bicycle a lot (faster and way cheaper than paying for parking on campus), lots of people thought it was very weird to do so. I'd show up at the usual bar scenes with my bicycle after taking the light rail down and most of my friends wouldn't begin to understand how I got there.

I take the local transit when I need to get deeper into the city and take the bus to the city parks around me with my kids. People think I'm a bit of a nut for doing so, seriously wondering why I wouldn't just drive.

I've met people that grew up in Dallas and didn't even know there was light rail. Most people don't have a clue how it works and don't care to spend a minute figuring it out. They don't even bat an eye at the thought of moving further and further out into the burbs, into developments that take ten minutes of driving just to leave one neighborhood.

>It is a great tragedy that the US with all its money and diversity of geography and people has only really managed to produce a single walkable city

Have you considered, then, that many people do not actually want this?

>So many cities outside the US manage to do this on a fraction of the budget.

Young yuppies with their Silicon Valley salaries get to spend time in European city AirBnbs and wonder "why can't America be like this?"

> Have you considered, then, that many people do not actually want this?

If so, the European city planning wouldn’t be popular within the US, but it’s the opposite. The few European style cities are incredibly attractive to live in.

> Young yuppies with their Silicon Valley salaries get to spend time in European city AirBnbs and wonder "why can't America be like this?"

Right.. and? They’re not representative? Or it’s unrealistic? That’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask for those that do get the opportunity to see functional dense urban areas in other places, especially as they don’t require anywhere near SV salaries yet are still lively and safe.

I don’t think the US will drop car centrism, partly because of the perpetual lower class social issues that make it dangerous to share public space with strangers, but you can get pretty far if you mix in high volume public transit like in NYC (or even SF BART for a smaller example), which greatly reduces the dead spaces that prevent walkability.

> because of the perpetual lower class social issues that make it dangerous to share public space with strangers

I never quite figured out why the US is so allergic to enforcing the public order laws already on the books with any degree of vigour

> that many people do not actually want this?

The concept of supply & demand shows people obviously do want this, given that the cost of living in that walkable city and in walkable places is so high.

The real reason? Americans become infatuated with the latest technological marvel too easily. For a while, this was the car. And unfortunately, rolling back all these car subsidies takes a while and is heavily fought against because people hate the feeling of having something taken from them.

Nah. We moved out of SF to East Bay for the same reason. It's not safe with kids

Idk about your second point, it’s only because I live in the city that I have time to enjoy it, after work and kids commuting to and from the city is too much of a time sink and there’s fuck all to do everywhere else in the bay.

I'm young, like cities, but dislike SF.

The main reasons are

- crime -- SF isn't like Asian cities where I can walk around safely at night

- lack of public transit AND lack of parking (either convenient parking OR good transit would be fine, but SF has neither)

- rents are unaffordably high and I need a lot of space for projects

- not clean

- Asian food is mediocre compared to suburbs like Cupertino and Fremont

I love cities like Singapore, Stockholm, Taipei, and Chengdu, though. These cities have everything I like about cities. Good transit, cleanliness, safety, and good food (by my standards) everywhere.

In SF, the northeast quadrant has most of the good public transit. Does that not fit your needs? And, I disagree that Taipei and Chengdu are significantly cleaner than SF -- about the same level of grime in my experience.

There’s different meanings to “cleanliness”. A bit of grime is fine. Drug paraphernalia, human feces, and tons of homelessness is another matter.

Yeah exactly.

Even I, a non-homeless tech worker, have been forced to pee in the bushes next to a sidewalk in SF, because I was refused restroom access by 5 businesses in a row and I was already getting heart palpitations trying to hold it in.

I have never been refused restroom access (and there was almost always a public one within 100m at all times) in most modern Asian cities. Or even south bay (which is basically Asia), people are usually nice here about letting you use restrooms.

No. The public transit there hardly goes anywhere in reasonable time. It takes a good 40 minutes just to get across it. Many times I've walked faster to my destination than the public transit estimates. The Muni trolleys get stuck at intersections and red lights and don't move faster than cars. The BART only goes down 1 smelly street. I'd spend 2 hours round trip (1 hour each way) just to buy a vegetable from the nearest Ranch 99. That's not city life.

Most Asian public transit systems blaze past all the cars on the surface. They actually save time from driving.

im probably an outlier but i love being able to walk to work as a middle aged city dweller.

In my experience everybody grown up outside a big city and especially in the countryside, look at big cities and say "no no, it's a mess, I'll never live there." That's independent from the age. Of course they go there for concerts, theaters, museums, maybe hospitals. People grown up in a big city tend to have the opposite reaction, ranging from "it's like being dead" to "there is nothing to do", which of course is false: there are different kind of activities. People that like sports usually will feel better outside a city.

That's so true.

You know what sucks? A ton of families-with-kids would love to stay in the city, if only the schools-- especially high schools-- were on par with what can be found for similar price in the suburbs. There is no physical reason it should be like this; in fact, just the opposite. Cities may have the density to support more bars, but they also have the density to support more varied after school kids' activities and cultural attractions, etc (and the ability to let middle and high school aged kids walk themselves to school and other places rather than becoming a chauffeur)

But the failing schools push many parents out against their own and their own childrens' preferences.

This is one of the weird dysfunctions of the USA. It's really not that different to how a lot of third world cities leave a lot of potential wealth on the table by having poorly functioning electrical grids with scheduled black outs. In both cases nobody really benefits and there's no real net savings for society, it's just money left on the table and burned away and is the biggest reason cities are seen as child-unfriendly when in fact they are inherently more friendly to children than a suburb where you're a prisoner till you get a driver's license.

> I know multiple retired or semi-retired people who have moved towards the center of a city

Is it because their kids have grown up? I can imagine myself living in a city like Paris or NY if I don't have kids. I get to enjoy a bustling city without needing to dealing with the challenges of raising kids.

cities cost more for smaller spaces. when you've got a family you need that space, but for two empty-nesters, a city location is smaller, easier to manage, and closer to things. elevators and small apartments on a single floor might even be preferable -- no stairs for bad knees.

also if you're not able to drive cuz your eyes or reaction time are bad, being walkable helps -- that exercise might even keep grandpa healthier, longer.

and in the case of my in-laws, a big draw was proximity to (good) medical care. literally walkable to the local hospital and medical services, and if something goes bad the ambulance can get them there ASAP.

and then you have more food options, more entertainment, etc.

anecdotally, city life becomes a net drain when one doesn't have time for themselves. In my mid-thirties now, and keeping up with family/travel/hobbies is more than I can handle on most days. I've gone to a great number of restaurants in the past and ... getting more sleep seems like a better bet for the day then going to another restaurant.

I'm sure that this will flip when I no longer have kids at home and have reached retirement.

> I do think that's specific to you and your circles. I know multiple retired or semi-retired people...

Just a note that this reversal could just as easily be specific to you and your circles.

In this thread all we have is two people who find anecdotally that some older people move to live near where they themselves live. Given how many people make some kind of change in retirement that's hardly surprising. We'd need actual data to come to any conclusion about large-scale trends.

Back in the early 90s my wife and I moved to SF because it had a thriving art and music scene and more interesting culture than the 'burbs of palo alto. But as you say, the long commute to SV was a killer and we moved back down. Back then SF was a bedroom community for SV with no tech sector. Businesses up there were banking (Wells Fargo, BofA, Crocker etc), retail, the local stock exchange, and a bunch of manufacturing.

Nowadays there's a bland sameness -- barely any music or other art much less much craziness. You can't imagine anything like the psychedelic scene appearing in SF much less Palo Alto these days, and most of what's left is in Oakland. Sigh.

they went to Santa Cruz, man.

Go Slugs!

The Taiwan of the countercultural Bay Area.

Depends on one's interests. It sounds like my preferences would be more in alignment with yours - music and art - and yes, SF is almost completely lacking that today. But if one were an active part of the LGBT community - SF is a buzzing option. They have various festivals and events almost daily.

Oakland music scene isn't particularly inspiring either. Definitely more independent music events in run down houses, but quality and inventiveness is too often of questionable value.

I lived in San Francisco in the very late 70s through to the 00s. My first apartment share was $50/mo. The late 70s had the dying embers of the Beat Generation and San Francisco was a sleepy town. San Francisco was great in the 80s with a ton of theater, music, dance, art, everything. It was good in the 90s although the late 90s dotcom boom pushed/priced artists out. The 00s became pretty boring and compressed. I moved to Oakland.

I would say that San Francisco is quite nice now, great bones, although too expensive for interesting people to live.

I've seen similar complaints from cities in rich countries around the globe

Basically to have thriving arts scene you need people in the 20s-30s to be able to live on a minimum wage job and do art/music/whatever in their spare time. Even better if it is a part-time job or some sort of government scheme.

If your cost of living is too high then you are restricting yourself to trust-fund 20yo and older people with a bit of spare time. Also high property reduce the number of venues.

20s really is the perfect time to live downtown.

What are your thoughts on Oakland now?

Oakland is more affordable for artists now than San Francisco but not even close to what San Francisco was in the 80s. But it's a very different time. I find myself occasionally trying to relive that and having to remind myself it's gone.

Oakland has crime now but 80s San Francisco had the drug wars with actual machine gun battles between the now gone high rise projects on Army (now Caesar Chavez).

it's true, the techies of the '90s and '00s who lived in sf embraced the culture (and suffered the commute). what happened in the '10s kinda steamrolled it.

> There is a famous paper about the location of company headquarters: they get as close as possible to the residence of company CEOs.

Boeing. That's what killed Boeing - moving HQ from the factory in Renton, WA to Chicago. Boeing has no plants anywhere near Chicago. But Dave Calhoun, the previous CEO lived in Chicago. He previously was the head of Nielsen, the TV ratings and marketing company, which has been in Chicago for a century.

It took far too long, but Calhoun is finally being eased out. Not fired outright, which would have been appropriate.

The move to Chicago was made by Condit. Ostensibly it was just a cover to stay far away from the wife while he kept his mistress shacked up at the HQ.

Oh, right. That was around the time of the strange merger with McDonnell Douglas. Somehow, the finance people from McDonnell Douglas ended up in charge. That didn't go well.

According to Wikipedia, Boeing moved its headquarters in 2001, a mere two decades before he became CEO, and the nearly half dozen that preceded him.

> If we don't consider the CEO's influence, I'm actually curious if the location of company headquarters has to do with the average age of the employees in the Bay Area. As the employees start to have families, they most likely move to the south bay for better or for worse, and I have a hard time imagine that they'd enjoy commuting via BART or Caltrain for more than an hour every day.

IME this is definitely true and it's often very intentional. One of the major reasons SF stole the startup scene from SV is that younger startup employees wanted to live in SF. As a startup founder you are very strongly incentivized to go where the talent is (or wants to be). When I was considering where to set up my startup a few months ago this was a huge consideration. Not quite at the level of HQ, but there's a reason Google has offices in both SF and South Bay as well, or in both SLU/SLU-area Seattle + across Lake Washington.

> If more people are like me who prefers living outside of the city proper, then I'd imagine a company will have access to more talent by moving its headquarters to the south of SF. I don't think it's about more vs less as much as matching the demographics of your typical employee. Eg experience levels, pay, work culture, personality, mix of job roles

Google has offices in San Francisco but it also has offices in South San Francisco, San Bruno, Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and San Jose. And probably some other cities I forgot. The "reason" Google has an office anywhere has to do more with "why not" rather than anything else.

Acquisitions.

Not the case with the main Google SF office (except now some buildings are indeed the results of acquisitions) but definitely for San Bruno and varied for the other ones.

I had the impression the Google SF office was for capturing that talent that would not be bothered to commute south; but that for most people there it was a career dead end, if you weren’t in Mountain View you weren’t in the game.

At least that’s what the people I know who worked there told me, I don’t have any real inside knowledge and the stories could be wrong despite being plausible.

Yeah, like almost every other central-city engineering office of that era, SF was initially a sales office that SF-resident ICs would sometimes work from on Fridays...and then more often, and then eventually teams wanted to move there, and then...and then...

That's not really how the SF presence developed historically but I admire your confidence

Did you mean to reply to me?

I wish I understood what you're getting at, because Google does not consider it's employees at all at this point, it's late stage capitalism sweetie. Is there a point, can you clarify?

Sweetie, it's not that hard, google considered them before.

P.S. Late stage capitalism === Early stage communism

> Late stage capitalism === Early stage communism

How so? Will you please indulge me you explain this a little?

Genuinely curious.

I mean, even by Marx's own theory. There will be no communism without capitalism fully unfolding and playing out. How will we know when the difference between one stage and the next? Unless we are talking revolution but that's not what most modern communists have in mind

The mentioned South Bay locations are xAI's Palo Alto office, and an office in Santana Row. Both locations likely have connections to Caltrain.

I don't know where xAI's Palo Alto office is, but transit in the corporate Palo Alto office are generally good. If xAI is in the Stanford Research Park, you'll be taking a shuttle that runs only during commute times, and takes 15-30 minutes, depending on where exactly you get off.

Santana Row is more confusing. You'll travel either to Santa Clara or San Jose and take a bus. From Santa Clara, the bus is ~15 minutes. From San Jose, the bus is faster, but you've got a half- or one-mile walk.

The Santana Row office is miserable to get to via Caltrain. You're going to want to bike or scooter and even then it's a trip on Stevens Creek/San Carlos, which is exceptionally busy at all times of day due to the two malls next to it and also it drops bike lanes for some portion of the road.

Santana Row will start charging for parking. https://www.ktvu.com/news/santana-row-is-charging-parking

I feel like this was the case already? Maybe not for 2 hours but I do distinctly remember that when I popped into the Twitter offices for a bit I was able to park there for a few hours but after that it would charge me

i concur. I think a lot of this is just sound business acumen.

Twit-er...X, isnt raking in cash like it used to. Musks changes like reinstating hate speech accounts and the blue check fiasco had a direct negative effect on advertising revenue and accelerated already downward subscriber trends. Leaning out the physical side of the already agile digital side was a good idea im not sure twitters old guard would have considered.

San Francisco has seen a talent exodus after the global pandemic. no senior SRE with 20 years of experience --whos also made to show up to the office five days a week-- is going to entertain San Francisco's traffic, crime, homelessness, or general congestion for even a minute.

Musk Twitter stopped paying office rent a long time ago. I can only assume they finally couldn't keep doing that without getting evicted.

Musk has been following his hero Trump in not paying those he owes money to. So now X stands for shmuck.

fwiw, hiring senior talent in SF works just fine. If you pay at the right pricing tier. SF is a decent city. It could definitely do better, it has issues, but if we all could stop pretending it's a post apocalyptic hellscape, that'd be nice.

Yes, you pay an SF premium. You pay a premium for most major cities, and the worse housing is, the higher the premium. But I'd bet moving to the South Bay isn't happening for that reason. SF pricing has a halo effect on the South Bay, and your savings will be minimal, if any. (I see little differences in South Bay and SF salaries, for larger companies)

What I'd wager precipitated the move is SF rents are stupidly high , and then you combine that with half the twitter offices being empty. If you believe loopt, San Jose office space is ~ half the cost of SF. Half the space, at half again cost - their real estate bill shrinks by 75%. And given that Twitters bill is likely ~$40M-50M/month, that's a good chunk of savings.

South Bay & Peninsula housing is actually more expensive than SF, though you do get a bit more for your money. Compensation is often marginally higher as well, though most companies with offices in both have them in the same salary band.

For senior engineers, I'd say opportunities weigh more than the difference in salary or even in overall package, unless the package correlates with the opportunities. I may complain about commute, but I'd still be happy to join an exciting startup in the city.

    > South Bay & Peninsula housing is actually more expensive than SF

Per square foot/meter? I find this hard to believe.

I mean, obviously it depends on what city you choose, but given that the article is specifically about X moving to Palo Alto....

San Francisco is $957/sqft median listing price [1]

Palo Alto is $1800/sqft median listing price. [2]

Hell, I live in Redwood City and the median is $996/sqft.

1. https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/San-Franci...

2. https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Palo-Alto_...

San Jose is a bit less, about $700/sf:

https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/San-Jose_C...

The Santana Row neighborhood ("Winchester Orchards") is pretty comparable, at $910/sf though. I was actually thinking of Mountain View & Sunnyvale, which are considered decent places to live in the South Bay but aren't quite as elite as Palo Alto. They are both about $1.2K/sf:

https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Mountain-V...

https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Sunnyvale_...

> but if we all could stop pretending it's a post apocalyptic hellscape, that'd be nice.

I’m very much not in the Valley or even the U.S. but I’ve seen a lot of videos and photos of SF streets being littered, about homelessness, drug use, something called bopping. Isn’t this real, or is it far less common than those videos make it out to be? Interested to hear this from people in SF.

There are a few very bad neighborhoods and the videos you are seeing accurately depict them. Most unfortunately, those bad parts are mixed into downtown where most offices are.

As a resident, it’s extremely disheartening and must be fixed. The Tenderloin has been bad for years, but fentanyl has taken it to the next level.

However, most neighborhoods are different. Most are free from encampments and open-air drug use. Many residents just avoid downtown and some aren’t wise to how bad it really is.

Hence why the city is still so expensive.

Here in India, it's a wide mystery why most startups prefer to headquarter in Bangalore. It made sense two decades ago but today there are several other Indian cities like Vizag, Nasik, Noida, Gurugram, Chandigarh, etc. which are more equipped, have better infrastructure and even lower cost of living. Still most folks prefer Bangalore just because it has been like that since ages and popularly called the "IT Hub". But logically, it doesn't make any sense at all!

It's a chicken & Egg problem. I run a startup in Pune, and we just don't get good developers here. We are open to remote, and most of the good candidates are in Bangalore.

What's the explanation? Better schools in Bangalore or something else?

Access to better schools is a factor in selecting a locality within the city but I don't think it has been a deciding factor in deciding the city itself.

Many cities including tier-2 cities have a variation of one of those "international" schools that parents seek and there's no significant difference in the quality of education between them.

Apart from the usual cycle of available talent + job opportunities, Bangalore has better weather and location wise it can attract talent from 4 states(these 4 states are major contributors to IT workforce compared to other states) while not being too far from place of origin.

I see. So it's a matter of geography basically.

better schools is not a factor at all. right out of college, or a little later most of the high quality engineers move to Bangalore because that's where the jobs already are. once people settle down a bit, they tend to be averse to move on average. it's network effect and sheer inertia. no one really wants it this way.

Nobody in their right mind would ever setup an office in Delhi or adjacent regions. The office politics alone should deter half of the people. The rest is taken care of by the increased crime rate, pollution and attitude of people. Vizag, Kochi, Pune, Chandigarh etc are all much better cities. In both the kind of people they attract as well as the overall quality of developers.

> As the employees start to have families, they most likely move to the south bay for better or for worse, and I have a hard time imagine that they'd enjoy commuting via BART or Caltrain for more than an hour every day.

The 25-35 crowd are probably the worst employees that Twitter can ask for; too experienced to "keep their head down" and too young to suffer from ageism and be tied down with families. For companies like Google and Twitter that traditionally lean left and encourage employees to speak up, moving the company headquarters is probably the easiest way to filter out activist employees (since these days the company is making a hard pivot to a privately held conservative operating model).

These companies have never encouraged employees to speak up. James Damore thought that was the culture, and he got fired.

and let's not forget the increase in crime that SF has experienced. Even department/CVS/etc stores have had to close due to the increase in crime.

Suburbs on average have less crime. i wouldn't say that south bay is ideal but it's better than SF.

Your ideal suburb describes most of the Europe(excluding few cities).

The typical commuter suburbs for SF companies are in the East Bay, in my experience. South Bay is a lot more expensive.

There’s no housing south of SF. That’s why the Menlo/PA/SC crowd originally invaded SF. It was cheap and hip.

MP and PA(not eastern) have a shortage. Santa Clara does not. It’s still pretty cheap to buy a house in SC compared to anywhere in the belt between San Mateo to Cupertino.

That seems reasonable - even if companies aren't moving based on where their employees are, employees are taking into account where the company is when they decide which jobs to take, and are probably more likely to leave a job if they find their commute too long.

They are moving to San Jose, which is a city. It may not be as cosmopolitan as SF (certainly not as compact) but the differences have narrowed some in the last decade or so. Not to mention that it has a larger population than SF.

I wonder if cheapish EVTOL travel might make a difference here. I.e. if CEOs effective travel time is reduced, does that affect headquarter location selection.

What did you mean by "move to south bay for good for worse"? I just couldn't parse your meaning.

My bad. I meant "for good or for worse". That is, I was trying to be neutral to the merit of moving from SF to the south.

Anecdotally, I've generally heard this phrased as "for better or for worse" :)

Oh yeah! Thanks!

They seem unaware that a lot of SF based people go to the east bay.

But it's not inevitable that families move to suburbs either. Commenter is partly perpetuating a 1960s era "white flight" kind of stereotype, where cities are said to be terrible for families. I happen to have two kids in SF.

Additionally, a lot of what drives people out of SF specifically is the expense.

SF is a great place for kids of all ages. But housing is indeed very expensive, as is childcare. Families in rent-controlled apartments who want more space without significantly higher expense don’t have a lot of options; several such families we know ended up moving out of the city (sometimes to elsewhere in Northern CA but often across the country to be closer to family). I don’t know anyone who moved because they thought their kids were having a bad time in the city.

Yes, but surely those people are not moving to the South Bay (which is just as expensive).

off topic: do you have a name or a link for the paper referenced? My company just moved to a new office that's "coincidentally" closer to the CEO's house, and I'd love to send it to him.

This came as a surprise to me but San Jose is actually one of the top 10 largest cities in the US.

Just saying, maybe south bay isn't SF, but it ain't idyllic peaceful suburbs either

This is why return to office is such a joke. It’s really “return to the office near where the CEO lives or lived at one time”

Like if Tim Cook decided to move to Alabama that’s where Apple Park would be

So dumb

> if Tim Cook decided to move to Alabama that’s where Apple Park would be

A current example of this is Walmart which is in the midst of trying to force a huge number of employees to relocate to Bentonville, AR. I can see why someone would move to NYC or SF for a job, since there are plenty of other options for career development, but you have to be pretty committed to Walmart for life (undoubtedly their intention along with workforce reduction) to decide to move your entire family to Bentonville.

Walmart has always been headquartered in Bentonville, AR so that's a huge difference from the other examples here. People in well paying jobs move all the time though so it's not the commitment or strategic retention plan you seem to imply unless you think everyone in NY or CA is so pretentious that they couldn't believe that Walmart employees are worth poaching despite their IT and analytics department being bigger bigger than most tech companies.

I guess not everyone working at Walmart headquarters are in well paying jobs though.

Relocating wasn't such a big deal when most family models were single income and women were basically all slaves and would follow their husband without having any say on the matter. These day, any relocation involve a discussion between 2 parties on the merit of relocating and possibility of career development for both. It is much more difficult.

>Like if Tim Cook decided to move to Alabama that’s where Apple Park would be

What a dumb take. Tim Cook lives in California because Apple was founded there over 40 years ago. And Apple will stay in California because most of the talent Apple needs to succeed is already there. And since Apple will stay in California so will their CEO.

You must be on some really good shrooms to think Apple will uproot itself just to move to wherever Tim Cook would move.

While this is true, it's also funny to note that Apple was only founded in South Bay because Jobs and Wozniak wanted to be close to their families. There was already talent in the region, but the origin of that talent started the same way. Shockley (of Shockley Semiconductor and traitorous eight fame) moved the company from LA to South Bay to take care of his mother [1]. Silicon Valley is only Silicon Valley because of "I want to be with my parents" decisions.

[1] https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-by...

Not relevant to any current actions by Twitter, but an interesting historical perspective is that it was very rare for a tech company to be in San Francisco.

Approximately all tech companies were in Silicon Valley proper (thus named) which is about (depending on who was drawing the boundaries) about 30-60 minutes south of San Francisco.

When Twitter opened in San Francisco I distinctly remember how weird it was to see a tech company up in SF. Then found it was due to tax breaks SF was creating for these companies and then lots more tech companies started showing up in SF.

This is not correct at all.

When Twitter was launched, SF was overflowing with startups on every corner. In fact it was the second wave of SF startups, being a handful of years after the dot com crash.

The only thing even slightly surprising about Twitter's location was that they were way down in South Park instead of more solidly in South of Market. They moved to the Tenderloin building in 2012.

> SF was overflowing with startups on every corner.

Can you name a handful of known startups headquartered in SF in the early 2000s?

I tried searching for stats on this but it seems more difficult than I have time for. So I turned to chatgpt, which (FWIW) agrees with my recollection:

In the year 2000, Silicon Valley startups were predominantly located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly in cities like Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose. San Francisco itself was not as prominent a hub for tech startups at that time.

While exact percentages are difficult to ascertain without specific data, it is generally understood that a relatively small percentage of Silicon Valley startups were headquartered within San Francisco city limits in 2000. The tech startup scene in San Francisco began to grow significantly later, particularly in the mid-2000s and beyond.

So many startups in SF. Most dead now of course. The first round of post-money hiring at Twitter took a few of my coworkers.

There were launch parties in SF every week in the late 1990s. Often multiple per week. The startups coordinated to not conflict. It was a very active scene. The first wave ended in the early months of 2000. There were a few very slow years after that, but things were picking up again around the time of Twitter's 2006 launch (and 2007-2008 scaling).

We in SF didn't consider ourselves part of Silicon Valley back then, so that might be throwing off the search results. The relabelling came later, when the never-formally-defined scope of "Silicon Valley" expanded to include SF city (but still skipping the bedroom communities between the city and the Valley proper).

(Edit: sibling of GP is correct, SF was mostly internet and media startups, agencies, etc. The Valley got most of the hardware startups. Twitter was a descendant of Blogger/Odeo/Pyra/etc, so SF city was an entirely expected location)

historically there was a lot of media and some internet in sf. more interesting hardware type tech companies generally clustered in the south bay with some exceptions (oqo, sega).

twitter was notable because they put a big campus in midmarket... but there was plenty of internet and multimedia that preceded them. (organic, macromedia, razorfish come to mind but there were countless others)

sure, no sun or apple, but let's be clear, twitter was no sun or apple either.

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