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Comment by pkinsky | Hacker News Reader

>Which brings us to a very important point for all the young programmer dudes: when you all crowd into the same tiny city and bid up the rents into the stratosphere, your available dating pool shrinks to a puddle (yet another consequence of the skewed gender balance in tech. sigh.) All the pour-over coffee in the world doesn't make you happy when you can't get a date, and those artisan cocktails are far less cute when you're jockeying for position at the bar in a crowded room full of guys. If you're a 20-something male programmer looking for a date in SF, I feel badly for you. Hope you like BART, because you're going to Oakland (if you're lucky!)

So what you're saying is San Francisco is now highly optimized for homosexuals? (part of why I want to move there from Boston, to be honest)

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Hah. I don't think you'll find a city in the world that's more highly optimized for gay men...but that was true before the tech boom, too.

castro is really pretty small; I think you're better off as a gay man in nyc.

Better idea would be to do a Media/Advertising/Entertainment focused start-up in West Hollywood in Los Angeles.

The high cost of living in San Francisco means that any demographic group that isn't defined by its high income is being marginalized, so this isn't the case.

to be honest i keep bumping into homesexuals (of either sex) in SF. I think its a pretty large part of the population, compared to other cities. if you swing that way, I'm pretty sure the dating scene is quite above average.

note: im straight

This is totally wrong. Yes SF has a ridiculous cost of living, but it still has an amazing ratio of single women to straight guys. Unlike the Peninsula, you do not need to be rich to meet and date attractive women in the City.

If you are an employed (white?) guy who can't get a date in SF (not to be confused with Palo Alto), you need to get out more, or just get on okC. There's a whole lot more to the City than yuppie bars in SOMA or the Marina.

Like anywhere, it can help to stand out a bit, and being a straight white guy without tons of money who works with computers is about as far from 'standing out' as you can get in that area, from my experience. I was a lot happier from that point of view when I got out of there and moved to Italy, where I ended up meeting and marrying a very smart and beautiful woman.

On the subject of "gay", something that I liked about the bay area was that gay is pretty common, and of course accepted and so it's just something that is, rather than someone's "defining attribute", so it's not this big deal. That's how things should be.

You have clearly never been to NYC or LA. One can get a absolutely get a date in SF, but the ratio is terrible compared to other US cities.

A single friend of mine in SF (who actually does quite well for himself) is fond of saying "any single man who moves to SF either is gay, has an asian fetish, or is crazy." It's crass and hyperbolic, but there's an germ of truth in there somewhere (FWIW, he's crazy).

It's been the best place for homosexuals for decades. I can remember a character from The Way of the Gun calling it a "Mecca for homosexual migration".

The character was refering to LA in the movie!

Gay men, maybe. Lesbians, probably not so much.

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