Is San Francisco The Brooklyn To Silicon Valley's Unbuilt Manhattan?
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Perfect description of the Valley. Somewhat better than say Northern Virginia, but by a hair.
In my experience of 2011 (visiting Santa Clara), quite a lot better than NoVA (where I lived at the time), but for the opposite reason than I think you'd say: everything in the Valley seemed open and spread out and inviting, rather than crowded and dirty, like NoVA feels. NoVA is just a step above cities I've been in, such as DC and NYC; the Valley is much more relaxing.
Of course, Alexandria and Arlington are also the only tolerable places in Northern Virginia.
I haven't lived in Richmond for a long time, but every time I go back, the better it seems to get. It's got a burgeoning cultural scene (music,food), and a beautiful river running directly through the city.
Also, perhaps you find Arlington/Alexandria to be the only "tolerable" places in Northern Virginia because they are the only urban parts of this area. If you care about fishing more than clubbing, there are far more desirable places to be (not to say I don't do some great fishing here in Alexandria myself).
I say I'm from Virginia because that's accurate and just as recognizable. But some people like to say they're from a big city even if they grew up far outside of it ... to each their own. Growing up in DC is a decidedly different experience from growing up in any part of Virginia and I'd find it disingenuous to claim either inaccurately.
You are confusing two different things.
I got the job offer, but rejected it. Never been back to SV until last year (not counting SJ). I actually live in California, but I will never move to the Bay Area.
My priorities are different from 1999. And while I no longer wish to live in SF, I am still avoiding SV. The primary reason is price.
I've spent a fair bit of time in both places since then and it's not changed my view much.
East Bay is charming and inexpensive. There are residents and young people who discuss more than option-pool restructuring and PHP/Rails. As long as I can continue to work in San Francisco, and as long as rents stay as high as they are in that city, I'll choose to live here.
Except it's not charming at all... it's much colder than the rest of California (it honestly feels like a different planet), MUNI absolutely sucks compared to any transit system in the civilized world (NYC/Europe/parts of Asia), and the homeless problem is the worst I've seen in any major urban center.
San Francisco has a long way to go before I'd consider it a world-class city.
Because tourists see the crooked street and the bridge and the hills and the cable cars. They don't see the high suicide rate or the muni or etc.
Uber and Lyft and self-driving cars will shortly solve drinking and driving and then my final complaint about the suburbs will be gone.
It's easier to put on a jacket if it's cold than to strip down if it's hot.
"MUNI absolutely sucks compared to any transit system in the civilized world"
It's better than pretty much everything else in California (except maybe BART? I don't take either very much).
But things are always distorted when you view from the highway.
If you're like me and don't care for a bar-crawl nightlife and would prefer to stay in and read (and own a car, though this isn't as important), you'll love Alameda. Don't tell anybody how good it is to live in Alameda, though, they'll all move here.
Lucky 13 + Scolari's is Alameda's Toronado + Rosamund's (though the beer selection isn't up to par)
Ark (on Park St) is one of my favorite Chinese restaurants in the bay area: hand-pulled noodles, braised egg tofu, and good green onion pancakes.
Park St feels somewhat like a "small down" downtown, similar to San Luis Obispo's but without all the college bars.
There are lots of beautiful Victorian-style houses, and there are some good school districts. Much of the island is on bad liquefaction zones, but there are nice parts that aren't.
I just moved to the north west corner of oakland (what realtors like to cal NOBE) and it's a really nice place to live. Close to ashby/macarthur bart, temescal, and the "suburbia" crap in emeryville that can be handy to have close at by even if I don't want to spend any time there.
If you are thinking of buying the competition is stiff. Took my wife and I 7 months and 6 offers to land a place. We love SF, but the cost of rent and not having an outdoor space made the east bay very attractive. I love it.
*At least two that I had heard of via my brother.
As a New Yorker, the one thing that kills me every time is the fact that the CalTrain shuts down so early. I was staying in Palo Alto some months back, and I needed to get to the station by 11:59 on a Friday night, because the alternative was an incredibly expensive cab ride back. It really cut into my Friday night plans.
Thus, you're living with roommates in a sketchy neighborhood, getting hassled for change/cigarettes/attention every 15 feet, and stepping in poop on your way to the hour-long shuttle ride to Google. Totally worth it, right? Except that you work 10-hour days, and you don't make it back to the city until after 8pm most evenings, anyway. The "lifestyle" you're paying for mostly happens on the weekends (the ones where you're not working), and consists of meeting up with the friends that you didn't have time to find (because you're all busy paying the bills), or dating (which you can't really do, because the city has turned into a tech-fueled sausage party; the gender bias in technology really starts to suck when only nerdy male engineers can afford to live the glamorous city life.)
Meanwhile, there are actually some charming neighborhoods down the peninsula, the weather down there is dramatically better, and you can have a garage (from which to build a startup, or a surfboard, or work on motorcycles, or start a band) and a dog. I predict a reversal of fortune in 3, 2, 1....
(Note that I say this as someone who currently lives in SF. It ain't all it's cracked up to be, especially if you're working all the time.)
Note: I'm terribly biased.
I will say this, though: I never thought Seattle was affordable until I moved down here.
If you're a young guy, and you've got the typical grooming and lifestyle habits that would cause people to label you as a "nerd", you'll have trouble in both cities. But if you're a little more put together and/or a little older, SF is massively better. A lot of the single women here are in their 30s, and a bit more established in their lives. They're not the kind of women who find conversations about code and video games to be desirable traits in a partner.
Seattle was abysmal in all dating categories. The place has a weird, backwards social vibe that makes it incredibly difficult to make friends, and every public space was at least 2-to-1 male. I went to dance classes where men had to dance with each other because there weren't enough women(!)
That said, there's been a huge shift in the number of well-off, vaguely stylish, 28-35 year-old single guys living in SF in the last two years. That's going to make things harder, but I don't know if it will ever get as bad as Seattle.
I've only ever really been in the dating scene in the bay area for a month or two a couple times, and ended up with girlfriends rapidly. I guess being involved in the rave/party/etc. scene, and being interested in smart/confident/etc. vs. a lot of other things = easy mode for dating? But I don't really have anything to calibrate against other than MIT.
And I grew up in the Northwest.
Being in New York now though, I reminisce frequently about the rent that, at the time, I thought was atrocious. Seattle has a lot going for it, very little of it appealing to a single, heterosexual male in his 20s.
Incidentally we (Factual) are hiring right now, drop me a line if you really want to hear me rant about the advantages of living and working down here.
Moving to SF from Austin for a bit (before moving back), I have no idea what people see in this place. SF weather is pretty terrible, nightlife sucks and things are overpriced.
In my world, a place that's charming at $1000/month is far less charming at $3000/month. But I also won't wait in line for two hours for Sunday brunch at the hottest new hipster restaurant, so empirically, I'm probably weird.
That said, I'll probably eventually move to somewhere that I can have a dog and a garage.
I'd rather just get a light industrial or detached R&D type building outside the immediate transit areas, though, where rents are more like $1-2 vs. $4-7 on Castro or University or 3 in SF. Parking solves my transit needs.
But there's no way that situation is sustainable, unless SF has plans to engage in a massive office building project in the next six months.
I'm with you on finding space outside the immediate transit areas, though. Even in SF, moving your office 10 minutes from BART will save you thousands of dollars a month.
SOMA seems to be getting pretty full-up. A lot of the light industrial that was here a few years ago is gone, and startups are pushing into the Potrero Hill area, where nobody would even think about going a few years back. I remember how long the Zynga building sat mostly vacant, and how all of those buildings on Townsend had vacancies back in 2008. They're all full now.
wat.
What transit system serves Palo Alto and/or Mountain View? CalTrain is about it, and it only goes northwest from there (up the peninsula, and housing isn't any cheaper up there).
Unless you were talking about VTA, but nobody takes VTA. There was a bit on (I think) a freakonomics podcast sometime in the last year saying that at current VTA ridership levels, it "costs" the environment less (in terms of carbon emissions) for a person to drive rather than taking the bus, because so few people take the bus.
And even at the level of individual stops with baby bullet service being prioritized -- University Ave is more expensive than California Ave, partially for this reason.
Rents go from $5-7 in downtown PA (University) and $3-5 in downtown MV (Castro) to $1-2 in the Hillview Ave/HP/etc. part of PA, or the weird ghettoey area where YC/old Hacker Dojo/etc. are (which is about 8-10 blocks from downtown MV).
There's really no great transit in the Bay Area. BART and Caltrain, if you're going on stops directly on the route, are the best. If you were going solely by transit accessibility at least cost, Millbrae would seem like the natural pick, but it kind of sucks.
I also know if Google built the tube they could figure out how to do it for a whole lot less than the $1B/mile that these things command in the public sector.
The city has a host of infrastructure and political problems that make things like basic housing development extremely difficult. And while it's fun when you're 20-30ish, single, and without kids the vast majority of employees will bail from SF when they get a little older. I know this seems far off, but it happens to almost everyone. Then... where?
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Health...
I know it has a reputation for bland mega-suburb feel (as though it were just a bunch of adjoined and conglomerated suburbs called a city) but it could change. Geology* could be an issue, if going over, say, 20 floors, but anything above 8 to 10 is good for density and could be made a viable alternative to SF hegemony in the region.
As a bonus, SJ, compared to SF has a functional gov't and has lower crime.
Hopefully this might mean BART runs past 12.
There's also a substantial crime problem to be solved in the East Bay (and SF, to be fair). The West Oakland and downtown Oakland BART stops are in the middle of neighborhoods with very pronounced crime and poverty - similar to Civic Center or the worst areas of the Mission. These places are a fair ways away from becoming places where working professionals want to settle.
Culturally and politically speaking, I do not believe either SF or the East Bay have a realistic chance of effecting a NYC-style crime turnaround, which was based around fundamentally conservative tactics that's very far from the politics of the Bay Area.
See downtown Brooklyn, where a similar situation/vibe exists - not the worst neighborhood in NYC by far, but also sketchy enough that the monied working professionals aren't interested. They built anyways, and now that neighborhood is in a weird limbo where the buildings have trouble attracting tenants, but at the same time generating enormous class and racial tension due to their mere presence.
This is impossible. Unlike NYC's subway, there is not a third set of rails (in enough places, at least) to keep the system online 24 hours a day, while being able to perform track maintenance.
Washington DC's subway is the same way and will never be a 24 hour system.
It would be a better use of time to invent a teleportation device, than to wish that many of the country's subways ran 24 hours a day.
EDIT: typo
Seriously, there's a reason SF is so expensive; that's where the banks and the lawyers are. SF was, for a time, the capital of California and is still the main nexus of political power. And I say that as someone with a love for LA as well as the Bay.
I highly doubt this. Bankers and lawyers have some upwards price pressure on the market certainly, but the rent explosion coincides very well with both dotcom booms. The bulk of the expense of SF is due to people like us.
See: http://thecacgroup.com/research/cities/san_francisco/histori...
There aren't any reasonable parallels between Manhattan/Brooklyn and SF/Valley IMO. The author mentions the endless debate about who is San Francisco's Brooklyn. The debate is endless because there isn't a candidate that even approximates a good answer.
Everywhere was, for a time, the capital of California...
That said, I think the article's critique of SF (and those I've read in this thread) are pretty much spot on.
E.g.: Proposal of ~ 8 floors high buildings in Palo Alto near the Caltrain.
http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=26860
Protests:
http://www.change.org/petitions/stop-the-proposed-high-rise-...
Sounds like they are protesting against highly toxic waste treatment in their yard, but it is only a bit higher building in one of the most suitable place in Palo Alto.
Tech will tend to move to places which are more pro-development like Redwood City.
The Bay Area feels like a typical tragedy of the common scenario - no one likes the absurd housing prices, or endless traffic, but no one is willing to allow high density housing/construction in their area. So the burden increases on everyone, bit by bit.
You can get high-density, highly-walkable urban neighborhoods at as little as three stories. In fact it's better for walkability to have a whole neighborhood of three or four story buildings than to pack the equivalent housing into a few 8 story buildings with lots of empty space between them.
Not that I expect the homeowners of Palo Alto would go for that, either.
In my hometown of Pittsburgh, the city has enough housing for 700K people (currently 300K) and the county has like 2M+. Pittsburgh is where people go to have fun in many great, vibrant neighborhoods, but the school system is abysmal, so young, professional families have no interest in living there without being able to afford the private schools.
It's an outlying concern, and I'm all for transforming Silicon Valley into to a metropolis (so long as it doesn't remove too many of the green preserves of the Peninsula and South Bay), but this sentence made me think of one long-term threat to development in the Bay, especially high-rises: earthquakes. Wouldn't the possibility of the Big One preclude too many skyscrapers from being built? And is it safe for the bulk of the tech industry to be located at such an area?
The counterpoint, of course, is cities such as Tokyo and Taipei, which already have been dealing with this issue on even larger scales.