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Comment by johnrob | Hacker News Reader

if something causes the bay area monopoly on startups to weaken in the near term, I expect it to be around retention challenges or costs.

We have a fundamental problem in Silicon Valley: there are not enough places for people to live in. This manifests itself in many ways (higher rent, higher salaries, higher turnover, etc) and is probably going to be a hard limit on how big the local tech industry can get. It's a certainty that other significant startup hubs will arise unless something changes.

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Exactly. Try keeping your senior engineers when they really need another bedroom for the baby.

Many of your young, hip engineers will want more room and a family-friendly lifestyle in ten years.

And if you're going to allow extensive work-from-home, how do you keep from diluting the benefits of your Silicon Valley location?

Isn't that about the time to fire them all and replace with cheaper recent grads? A CRUD app doesn't need a decade of experience.

I don't know if you are being sarcastic, but I find your attitude despicable. I hope I never get to work for you.

LOL I'm discussing the view from outside of how SV "works". Its an open question who dislikes that particular aspect of the topic more, you or I.

Then we're good. :)

I agree. It wouldn't hurt for SV to allow some focus on fixing local issues. Housing being the most important problem in my opinion.

Why oh why aren't more companies returning to the South Bay, specifically San Jose? Downtown SJ is tiny compared to San Francisco's. And there are plenty of tracts for office parks in the suburbs. Sure, all of the hip young hackers want someplace cool to go to, but it's only an hour away to the north.

I have zero interest in working in San Jose because I have zero interest in living anywhere within commuting distance of San Jose (no, an hour away is not within commuting distance).

May I ask why not, and where would you like to live, and why?

I live in London, but I'm just generally curious about the SV/SF area.

Dating is absolutely horrible for men in the south bay. That 1 hour barrier puts many brakes on even getting a date with all the single women live in SF and the north east bay area. SF is where all the other young people are. The south bay is suburban families.

It's chicken and egg, innit? If there was an economic incentive for people to live in San Jose (say, the tech scene was revitalized from actual startups as opposed to the Adobe/Cisco/eBay/Yahoo!/IBM dinosaurs, and Pinger), then there would be greater demand for SJ to densify, and have attractions, and thus invite more young people to live there. But because young people don't want to live there as it is, companies are not going to move there. Infinite loop.

But that same argument goes for Bumblefuck, Arkansas, no?

What's an hour away from BMF with night life? The trip from SJ to SF may suck, especially with the Bay Area's appalling lack of a unified transportation system, but it'll still do in a pinch for SJ denizens to visit.

Well the data shows it's quite a lot, given the premium people are willing to pay for living in SF... Spending 2x5 hours (at least) per week stuck in traffic is worth quite a lot of money for many people.

Even if you have a bunch of young people in one area, it doesn't mean they will mingle with the rest of the city. Stanford for example keeps within it's own bubble for the most part. There are PhD students who never even go to university street in Palo Alto for example. A Stanford alum I dated for a few months confirmed the same thing. It's only been relatively recently that many tech startups have been moving to SF. It used to be the south bay where many startups lived.

You live in SF/Berkley as a single person, you move down to the south bay to raise a family in stable suburbia with 'good schools' vs. the dice roll that is SF. That is the pattern. More tech companies and mostly male tech workers wont solve it. Downtown SJ is already a bit dense as it is.

Indeed. I moved away from Silly Valley about ten years ago, and I'm never going back (to live there).

- The public schools are mostly terrible (we'd have to put our kid in private school unless we got into one of the really good school districts).

- House prices are crazy.

- The environment is just . . . bad. I didn't know how much I missed actual weather until moving away (to Seattle, if you must know -- I don't mind the rain much at all).

About the only things I miss from the Bay Area are my friends, the year-round motorcycling, and the hard-core high tech culture (though there is a lot of that here in the Seattle area).

We have a fundamental problem in Silicon Valley: there are not enough places for people to live in.

Transportation is your problem, along with NIMBY regulations (fought-for by limousine liberal hypocrites) that prevent proper growth. Silicon Valley is not Manhattan, with its daytime population density of 170k per square mile. It should not be expensive and congested. It's just badly planned, with a lot of regulatory corruption keeping housing scarcer than it should be.

The risk is turning Silicon Valley into Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is actually a much better place to live now for people in tech than the bay area. All the young people want to live in overpriced SF and the ones with families want to live in the south bay.

In LA the thriving tech community is all in west Los Angeles, where Venice is the hip San Francisco (but waaay cheaper) and Santa Monica / West LA has great homes (also much cheaper than say Palo Alto [if you exclude beach front]). And these 2 neighborhoods are 10-15 minute commute, very different than the hour commute between most of the south bay and SF.

I've lived in LA for ten years. Commuting anywhere can be a nightmare at any random hour of the day. Housing prices are amazing in comparison though -- a third as expensive as the Bay Area, I'd say (rental). They are building some new rail lines, but it's going to be a while... Great food too!

As it is, South Bay is already a miniature LA in terms of sprawl and commuting, as well as concrete (lack of) architecture and strip malls.

No joke on poor transportation.

My g/f lives in outer Richmond and takes me over 50+ min for a bus to soma. Might as well live in Oakland...

Let's say you have a bus line with 40 stops. I wonder what it'd look like if you ran two lines with 20 stops each: you run same num of busses on same route, each bus just skips every other stop, alternating with the next bus.

Wait times at any given stop don't dramatically decrease in absolute sense. And if each stop takes 30 seconds, could shave 10 min off route.

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