Why I Moved My Startup to Oakland
brennenbyrne.com
brennenbyrne.com
Oakland is a hell of a lot cheaper to live in. Groceries, restaurants, rent, drinks, office space, hotel rooms, air fare: everything is cheaper.
In Oakland, we have a burgeoning uptown scene, punctuated by the Art Murmur, an event which started in 2005, and has blossomed into a giant street festival that very accurately reflects the diversity of Oakland. It's a First Friday roll call for the city, and the Bay Area.
That "Beer Garden" mentioned elsewhere, was a hipster coffee shop before that, and a cheap cafe before that, all willingly handed with great care from owner to owner. Gentrification has room to spread in Oakland, so while some complain about it, it mostly removes empty lots and vacant windows, not mom and pop businesses.
The Mission, on the other hand, sees gentrification at the cost of existing businesses. And speaking of the Mission, Oakland's Fruitvale district is the cheapest, most active place you can live for under 4 figures, while still being 30 minutes from downtown SF via BART or car. Fruitvale has become quite the destination, for the adventurous.
I could go on: The Chapel of Chimes is a Julia Morgan masterpiece, a labyrinth of death located in the hills. The Rose garden has a resident turkey. There's a couple breweries that host quiet BBQ's, Jack London Square, the various parks in the hills. The Hills.... The Fox and the Paramount. Van Kleefs.
And my own personal favorite: http://www.themade.org
One of the big advantages of SF (and especially the financial district) is that it's possible for most people in the city, the East Bay _and_ the South Bay to get to work in less than an hour. I want to make the commute decent for as many employees as possible.
Oh jeez. The way people talk about it now, you'd think that San Francisco was some sort of eternal pre-requisite for founding a startup, rather than the flavor of the moment. Startups didn't want to be here until a few years ago, and it isn't exactly a practically motivated decision today. Startups get founded here mostly because a certain subset of 20-somethings want to live in the city.
Anyway, I was almost instantly burned out on that hype almost before it happened. It wasn't the tech but the whole utopianism that was tiresome. Technoids in fantasy land. Ugh.
I couldn't afford SF and liked Oakland a lot more, especially Chinatown and the area around the lake, and the swap meets, and the tiny computer stores. The Black culture, southern culture, Black Muslims, all that was new to me. The crime, not so cool, but whatever. SF had hella crime too.
I guess my old San Francisco and old Oakland are no more.
Is this true in practice? How big of a hassle is it if you don't have a car (and don't want to spring for an expensive taxi/Uber ride)?
(This reputation is a big reason why I don't want to ever move to the Bay Area. I currently live in Brooklyn, and can easily get home from Manhattan in 20 minutes... at 3am if I want to. In Cambridge/Boston the T shuts down, but not until around midnight and you can still bike or walk.)
(Edit: I was misinformed. I'd heard the BART shuts down at around 10pm, but it seems it's actually more like midnight, similar to the Boston area, and I didn't know there were all-night buses providing service between SF and Oakland when BART is closed.)
You could take the all nighter AC transit bus (get a clipper card) http://transit.511.org/accessible/schedules/routeinfo.aspx?c... which runs from SF to the east bay.
Though biking a 5 mile long bridge with no bike lane on half of it sounds terrifying, so I'd probably consider it still not bikeable for now.
The Bay Bridge's western span has no such thing.
After midnight, I took lyft back from Polk for $35.
Around 11pm, I took uber back from Mission Bay for $29.
Around 2am, I took AC transit bus back. The people taking it were cool, but it was a hassle for two reasons: finding the right bus stop in the city (and timing it) and its stopping about 15 minutes away from my place (not ideal at 2am).
The regular transbay busses that depart from the transbay bus terminal are much better (the F stops right in front of my place), but they don't run during the wee hours of the morning.
That being said, I really like living in Emeryville because of the gentrification of nearby Oakland and Berkeley.
There are more people than you might think who are happy to live and work here here, and you just can't beat the rent or the weather. Feel free to swing by sometime and say hello - we're always happy to meet others in the small club that is the Oakland startup world.
But, I have a problem with this, is moving an hour outside of a city really relocating? I'd argue if you don't want to be comfortable move to a city where you have no connections. Focus on somewhere not particularly welcoming to tech entrepreneurs and really get out of the comfort zone. Otherwise, I don't think you really moved your startup anywhere.
Companies, especially tech, in SF usually offer these cards. I think it's the law'ish. It's a mix between the company straight giving you money + pretax deductions. I have the purely company-paid-for option, it covers about 10 days of me going from Concord to montgomery and back.
This kid is naive.
Most of the crime is isolated to a few specific areas. You realize there's a lot of crime in SF, too, right? And that crime is concentrated in the areas where a lot of startups have their offices (e.g. the Fidi). Do you factor that in to your search when you look for a job in the City?
Just downvote and move along. The lack of responses would hurt way more than any clear appeals to logic, I assure you.
Yes, there are slightly more violent crimes in Oakland than San Francisco (and there's more property crime in San Frnacisco)[1], but on the whole they are pretty equivalent in terms of safety; especially if you stick to the 'nicer' areas of both.
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Crime-up-in-Oakland-much...
http://www.businessinsider.com/most-dangerous-cities-in-amer...
And according to the link you posted, Oakland has less than half the population of San Francisco, but 37% more violent crime.
Most of San Francisco is safe, with just one or two neighborhoods being dodgy. Most of Oakland is unsafe, with just one or two neighborhoods being safe.
Oakland is one of the most dangerous cities in the USA. Just because you live there and haven't been gunned down yet, doesn't mean it's not happening to many other people.
It's literally your life, so do your own research and don't listen to me or anybody else.
<BIGconspiracyhat> Any attempts to show Oakland, Africa or African-americans in any kind of positive light or as victims will always, _ALWAYS_, get troll'ish/meta/hyper-pedantic comments that derail the main topic and/or meaningful discourse of the subject at hand, completely blowing up the comment threads. It works well on places like HN because almost everyone here likes to debate & discuss. But their arguments will become so spacious that you'll need 5 screen-lengths to debate with them and thus ruining the comments for anyone else who actually wanted to talk about the article. </BIGconspiracyhat>
Please let's ignore these guys. We know they're wrong, no point debating with them. We'll never convince them and the comments will get bloated with arguments back-in-forth about crime stats, someone will eventually use the "R" word and then BOOM, all meaningful discussion nullified by 5+ pages of of debate about some non-significant detail. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6365495
NOTE: An idea for the comment section, a way for users to flag a thread as "superfluous". If it gets enough of these, the whole thread is moved off to a small link on the side labeled "Superfluous thread started by $USER" where clicking on it give you a little scrollable window to view it and easily dismiss it when you're satisfied the thread had no real value. Perhaps each user's profile even shows how many superfluous threads were credited to him/her.
If the original poster had moved his startup to Stockton, we would be having the same conversation.
This post is another example of a long history of gentrification, which also has a racial component. Race is absolutely on-topic here.
That doesn't mean I expect said discussion to be productive.
There are some really bad areas of Oakland and of SF, and they're fairly near the popular-for-startups areas (the Mission, Downtown Oakland and areas adjacent). Pac Heights and Oakland Hills/Piedmont are both quite safe, but are not really startup areas.
The biggest problem with Downtown Oakland is that it empties out at 5pm. The areas with more activity are either lacking in office space, or are more dangerous (particularly if you don't drive). And the other problem is that Oakland is quite spread out, so things are in different neighborhoods.
The average (mean, per capita) crime in Oakland is higher than in SF, but in both cities, there are a few pockets of extreme violent crime, and fairly widespread property and nuisance crime over a large area. Neither SF nor Oakland is a particularly well governed city.
OK yeah I got mugged once. But nonviolently, LOL. Only cost me $20. This was near Downtown.
I've driven to Oakland once, and it was to pick up a friend after he missed a connection on BART - Within that 30 minute window of me driving to pick him up he was nearly mugged by a group of 3, jumped in a black windowless van as an escape route - and somehow managed to have that driver be an ex-taxi driver who noticed he was in trouble.
There's obviously some more dangerous, and some safer areas of the city - but it's still known as having an extremely high crime rate.