Tech's center of gravity shifts north to San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

Tech's center of gravity shifts north to San Francisco

itworld.com

30 pointsagwa19 comments

Sounds healthy. I'm certainly not alone in being a city person who wouldn't want to live anywhere that doesn't have everything in walking/cycling distance, good public transport and all the other features of a dense urban setting.

I wondered how long SV could continue to bitch about talent shortage whilst ignoring such a major portion of the population. Especially young and ambitious talent tends to gravitate towards the lifestyle of major cities, and has been for generations. Why would tech be an exception?

I'm guessing a lot of young people currently employed in Silicon Valley consider living there a (minor) sacrifice rather than a perk.

There's lots of companies already doing this. Every morning in SF you have hundreds of buses filling with young folks commuting to work down at Apple or Google or Facebook. Uniformly, the age range on the bus is 22-35.

The larger tech companies aren't moving to SF any time soon. Too many of their execs and employees want to live in houses, and there just isn't space in SF for campuses that will hold ~10,000 employees, nor many skyscrapers available, either. Plus there are still prohibitive tax issues to being in SF, unless (like Twitter) the city cuts you a break.

I'm still waiting for the tech world to discover the East Bay.

It has Oakland and Berkeley -- not cities on the scale of SF, but offering reasonably dense downtowns and cultural life.

BART vs. CalTrain. Readily commutable, with 4-15 minute headways and highly reliable service from 5am to midnight, rather than the often 1-hour interval schedules and mid-day lapses of CalTrain. Some of the newer CalTrain livery beats BART, but the latter is upgrading soon.

Access to a much broader (and cheaper) housing stock: Alameda and Contra Costa counties, with commutes via BART, 80, 580, 880 and 24. Granted, many of the highways are chronically congested, but less so than 101, and more useful for commutes than 280, which is largely a high-speed SF - Palo Alto/Cupertino link.

Options for much more dense infill development without the Penninsula's NIMBYs. Granted, there are the East Bay NIMBYs, but they're slightly less focused and rabid.

SF does have considerable growth opportunity available, though existing transit is stretched, and there remains resistance to growth. That said, development in the SOMA / China Basin area in the past two decades has been pretty considerable.

Edit: and of course, UC Berkeley. Not Stanford. But more than a match.

It's tragic that the SF city government is so set in its ways. There's a lot of people who are priced out of SF because of the city's reluctance to increase housing stock and to maintain rent control.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, and rent control prices people out of SF.

SF has limited space. Price is not the only way to allocate space. Local government can, within limits, set other ways such as rent control (essentially a form of seniority). The local government representatives are democratically elected in seemingly uncorrupt elections, so I have to assume this is the will of the majority of the city residents. Get over it and deal with it.

SF has limited space mainly because city homeowners lobby against new building permits. 418 housing units constructed in SF in 2011 -- do you seriously think that in a city with $3000 one-bedroom apartments, there aren't hundreds of real estate developers who would build new units here?

The will of the majority is no evidence of fairness or moral rectitude - the will of the majority is what was responsible for slavery, institutional racism, and now marriage inequality.

I think you have that backwards: city homeowners lobby against new building permits because SF has limited space. They feel their neighborhood is plenty crowded, their views are blocked quite enough, and traffic is already congested, etc. Hundreds of developers at 5-100 units each will significantly change the density and life experience in the city.

I was referring to the will of voters as opposed to a cabal of corporations or corrupt influences. Obviously, majorities that impinge on civil rights need to be overruled. It is not a civil right that just because you want to live in the city and you have more money than a current resident, you should be allowed to do so. Nor is it a civil right for a developer to build an oversized and overcrowded building when their property zoning allows a modest residence.

Any right that the government grants to a person impinges upon another right held by someone else. If you grant someone the right to live in a rent-controlled apartment you're forcibly removing the right of the property owner to rent out his/her apartment at any terms.

It's not like any of these rights are free, they come at steep costs, and it's hard to say who should actually be the stakeholders of any given decision. Should it be the people owning property in the city? (that's how decisions in condominium buildings are made -- by owner's vote, not by resident's vote). Should it be people living in the city right now? Should it be people who would live in the city if the measure in question was adopted? How much influence should people in one neighborhood have over what happens in another neighborhood (i.e., should there be a neighborhood level of city government, and what powers should it have relative to the city government?)

The same set of stakeholder definition issues come up when thinking about granting work visas to a foreign national -- should that individual's desire to work in the United States be part of the decision to let him in, since once you do, he'll be a voting American citizen, or should he not have a say in that decision since he's not yet a citizen?

Every time the planning department has tried to increase density along the transportation corridors on the west side of the city, the neighborhood groups come out in force against it. We desperately need light rail and five story mixed-use all the way down Geary.

San Francisco is the second most densely populated major city in the US after NYC, situated on a 7X7 mile peninsula surrounded by water, with significant numbers of historic buildings and neighborhoods that can't be reasonably torn down and replaced by high density housing.

Blaming high rents solely on city officials and rent control overlooks these realities which shape the economics of real estate in the city.

There are plenty of buildings which aren't historic and/or really could be torn down regardless.

I suspect the next major quake (long overdue) will sort much of this out anyhow.

A lot of my silicon valley peers and I opted to live in the SF area and commute south for work because we found SF & Oakland far more entertaining on nights and weekends.

As more and more tech jobs became available in SF itself, we started taking them.

I commute from SF and I hate it. Two hours of my day are spent on a bus five days a week.

I hear Google has an office in the city and, if you do your time in Mountain View and they like you and want to keep you, they'll move you up to the city. I'm sure Apple, FB etc could do the same.

That is incorrect.

Tranferring to sf is almost always done as a team move, and they will not let you transfer up to the city if your new team does not already ahave a sizeable contingent up there.

It is not a carrot or a reawrd, it mainly has to do with team chemistry and logistics.

"Because Palantir has taken over all of the available office space in Silicon Valley, the Startup Bubble has shifted and grown. The Bubble now encompasses the majority of San Francisco, in addition to the Valley and its other territories."

(not from the article)

I like to think that I am ahead of the game. My startup is so lean and progressive, not only do I have very few employees (none) but once (if) I am (ever) ready to hire, I have the ultimate address for my headquarters: the internet.

Hear hear. It's all about remote employees these days. You miss the best talent by only looking at ten square miles of a huge planet.

Wasn't San Francisco already part of Silicon Valley?

Technically no, the 'Valley' that is Silicon Valley is actually the Santa Clara Valley. But for all practical purposes everyone in the 9 bay area counties consider themselves to be part of 'Silicon Valley' at one time or another.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com